On 10 November 2026, Russian strikes hit five major electricity substations in Ukraine, leaving homes in six regions without power as negotiations opened in Abu Dhabi. For Ukrainians enduring repeated attacks on energy infrastructure, the consequences extend into water supplies, heating, and the routines of everyday life. Each outage carries costs far beyond replacing damaged equipment. A modern economy can lose much of its ability to function while much of its physical infrastructure remains standing.
This is an increasingly relevant warning for economies far from the battlefield. Governments are accelerating electrification to meet climate commitments while competing to host energy-intensive AI infrastructure. Large commercial facilities may be able to maintain operations through disruptions that overwhelm nearby public services. For developing countries, the question reaches into the terms of economic development itself: who pays to keep the wider society functioning when the infrastructure on which growth depends is under stress?
An Electrifying World, an Expanding Exposure
Türkiye’s COP31 presidency has proposed the 35-by-35 Global Electrification Pledge, seeking to lift electricity’s share of global final energy consumption to 35 percent by 2035. The rationale is compelling: greater electrification can reduce emissions and improve efficiency, while the expansion of AI, cloud computing, and digital services brings its own demand for reliable power. These changes make electricity more central to productive activity and the delivery of public services, increasing the potential economic consequences of a prolonged interruption.
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Those consequences depend on the quality and diversity of infrastructure. Greater electrification can strengthen resilience where governments invest in dependable systems and alternatives during emergencies. But the incentives are uneven. New capacity can be celebrated in investment announcements; spending that allows a hospital or water utility to continue operating during a future crisis is harder to see, even when the losses it prevents may be substantial.
Competing for Digital Capital
This tension is acute in the Global South, where digital infrastructure is being promoted as a route to investment and technological upgrading. Governments must offer predictable access to electricity and credible delivery timelines while protecting the interests of existing consumers. Faster expansion can increase the pressure to focus on bringing new projects online, leaving the financing of resilience in surrounding communities as a separate and less visible policy decision.
Malaysia has begun to confront the allocation of these costs. The World Bank reported that, by December 2024, 38 data center projects had held electricity supply agreements with a combined maximum contracted demand of 5.9 gigawatts. In October 2026, Investment, Trade and Industry Minister Johari Abdul Ghani said investors would have to fund transmission upgrades required by their projects and pay for reserved electricity capacity even when they did not use it in full. The stated aim was to prevent newcomers from disadvantaging existing economic activity.
Malaysia’s decision puts a price on capacity. It raises a further question that receives less attention in debates over digital infrastructure: who finances continuity when essential services lose access to shared infrastructure? A data center operator can pay for its connection and protect operations within its premises, while the public institutions that sustain a functioning city face a very different set of budget constraints. Commercial uptime and social resilience can diverge even where the underlying investment is economically beneficial.
When Continuity Is Unequal
In March 2026, an electricity disruption at the Johannesburg headquarters of South Africa’s National Health Laboratory Service interrupted its TrakCare information system. Public health facilities faced delays in laboratory workflows and access to results. Ntobeko Ntusi, president and CEO of the South African Medical Research Council, told Daily Maverickthat the service appeared to lack a UPS or another backup system. A failure affecting one location was consequently felt across a much wider public healthcare network.
A different fault line emerged in Batam, Indonesia. On 5 October, residents blocked access to Nongsa Digital Park after prolonged interruptions to household water supplies. BP Batam attributed the shortages to dry conditions and rejected claims that data centers had caused them while describing different supply arrangements for industrial facilities and nearby neighborhoods. The dispute concerned water, but its significance extends to electricity: a visible gap in the ability to maintain basic services can shape the public’s judgement of an investment, regardless of whether the investor caused the original disruption.
The costs of expanding infrastructure can also be distributed unevenly. A November 2026 Nature Energy study, summarized by Cornell University, found that across four US grid regions, data centers paid an average of 38 percent of the $8.25 billion in infrastructure costs associated with their growth in 2025. Other customers bore the remaining 62 percent, much of it falling on households. The finding is not a universal pattern: E3, reporting on its earlier work for Virginia’s Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission, found minimal historical cost-shifting under the arrangements it examined. What matters is how contractual and regulatory choices allocate costs and which costs they recognize in the first place.
From Unequal Services to Political Risk
The divide between private resilience and public vulnerability can become politically consequential when essential services are interrupted. People experience infrastructure through access to water, medical care, and the ability to earn a living. If a well-protected digital facility continues operating while neighboring services falter, residents may question the priorities behind the development bargain. They do not need to prove that the facility caused the disruption to express anger about the difference in protection.
Batam shows how concerns over basic resources can mobilise opposition at the entrance to a digital investment zone. Similar tensions during an extended electricity failure could threaten public confidence, create pressure to revisit permits or investment incentives, and raise the cost of operating for companies with no direct responsibility for the outage. How far dissatisfaction escalates depends on the authorities’ credibility, the quality of public services, and whether communities see meaningful benefits from development.
This makes the continuity of public services a commercial issue as well as a public obligation. A company may have an excellent business-continuity plan yet remain exposed to the political consequences of surrounding disruption. If its workforce and host community cannot function normally, the apparent security of the private facility offers only partial protection for the investment. Social license is easier to sustain when the wider economic environment is seen to work for the people living in it.
Pricing Continuity into the Investment Bargain
Governments are beginning to price specific pressures more explicitly. Malaysia has announced charges for infrastructure upgrades and reserved capacity. In Batam, BP Batam has required data center investors to build their own seawater desalination facilities so industrial demand does not compromise household water supplies. The requirement was announced on 24 September 2026, before the October blockade. These measures address capacity and resource access. Neither, on the evidence available here, establishes a wider mechanism for financing the continuity of essential public services during a prolonged disruption.
That is where investment agreements could become more ambitious. Where an independent assessment shows that a major project materially increases pressure or risk within a shared electricity or water service area, the agreement could require a proportionate contribution to continuity arrangements for nearby hospitals or public water facilities. The obligation would be specified before approval, independently monitored, and limited to risks reasonably attributable to the development. It would turn resilience from a vague promise of community benefit into a defined part of the investment bargain, without asking one investor to repair every pre-existing weakness in public infrastructure.
Public authorities would still carry responsibility for protecting essential services, with development finance institutions able to support projects whose social benefits are difficult to recover through commercial charges. Investors gain from clearer rules and a lower risk of disputes when communities can see how essential services are protected. For governments competing for mobile capital, credible public-service continuity may increasingly strengthen the investment proposition itself, alongside power prices and access to markets.
Ukraine has made the economic reach of power disruption impossible to overlook. The investment choices facing developing countries are made in much less dramatic circumstances, often in negotiations over costs, incentives, and infrastructure access. Those choices will determine whether digital growth also leaves societies better able to withstand shocks. The next contest for digital capital may be shaped as much by that confidence as by the price of power.
