When a Ukrainian opens "Diia," pays with a PUMB card, or waits for a New Post parcel, he doesn't think about whose infrastructure physically stores his data. And the answer to this question is about De Novo co-founder and CEO Maksym Aheyev, a guest on the new episode of the "Higher League" podcast on LIGA Business channel.
De Novo is not an abstract cloud provider. The company's main activity is cloud IT solutions for Ukrainian enterprise business. The client portfolio includes: Naftogaz, PUMB, KERNEL, Prozorro, Terrasoft, Diia, Nova Poshta, and others.
That is, the infrastructure that holds state registration, banking operations, delivery, and public procurement for millions of people is not somewhere "in the cloud" in an abstract sense, but concrete server racks, the control over which is the subject of a very real struggle.
A market worth billions
This struggle already has a price. In 2025, the IaaS/PaaS services market in Ukraine reached ₴7.2 billion, and accounting for additional costs, the figure apparently exceeds ₴10 billion. But these figures conceal a non-obvious truth about donor assistance, Ukraine's defense capabilities, and a new distribution of power between Ukrainian and global providers.
Behind the figures is not abstract IT sector statistics, but a concrete question: whose servers store data about mobilization, defense procurement, or patients' personal information, and who can physically cut off access to them at a critical moment.
Here arises a discrepancy in the interpretation of how much Western support for Ukraine's digital sector actually costs. Maksym Aheyev drew attention to the fact that the Center for Innovation and Development of Defense Technologies of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine spent 15 million hryvnias to purchase Microsoft Azure services, and called the statement by Microsoft Regional Director Oleksandr Krakovets about providing over $500 million in support for Ukrainian IT infrastructure unjustified.
The difference between actual purchases and public statements about the scale of assistance is the very conflict of interest around which the discussion about economic nationalism in IT is built: who pays, who counts the benefits, and who determines what counts as "support."
Digital sovereignty as an asset, not a slogan
In spring, Ukrainian cloud providers decided to act systematically. On April 22, Ukraine created the Digital Sovereignty Alliance, which included cloud providers GigaCloud, De Novo, and the "PARKOVYY" data center.
The logic of the union is simple and at the same time commercially beneficial for its participants: digital sovereignty has become a factor of economic independence. Your own ecosystem keeps funds within the country.
But behind this thesis lies a question that cannot be avoided: for the state, the value of data is important to emphasize, because the issue is not even about money, as in the case of commercial companies, but about something much more important — national security and digital sovereignty.
If state registries, medical records, or defense logistics physically lie on servers outside the country, state sovereignty depends on decisions made in foreign jurisdictions — and on whether these decisions will remain friendly if the political weather changes.
Technofascism and the price of a "digital imprint"
In the interview, Aheyev goes beyond the purely infrastructural topic and talks about what will happen when a mass of personal data falls under the control of artificial intelligence without proper restrictions. The idea of a "digital imprint" — a collection of everything a person leaves on the network: payments, locations, habits, communications — turns an abstract privacy threat into a concrete economic and political tool. Whoever owns this imprint of millions of citizens owns a lever of influence that requires neither an army nor elections.
This is where Aheyev introduces the concept of technofascism — not as a journalistic metaphor, but as a model where control over data and algorithms gives unelected structures power comparable to state power. For a country that is simultaneously waging war and building a digital state through "Diia," this is not a theoretical discussion: each new digital service increases the amount of data that needs to be protected, while also creating temptation for those who want to exploit it.
What's next
Ukrainian providers have already institutionalized their position through the alliance and are trying to get a seat at the table where the rules of the game for European cloud markets are formed. The question remains practical: is the state ready to legislatively cement the requirement to store critical data on the territory of the country, rather than relying on the goodwill of global cloud providers? The answer to this will determine who will control the digital imprint of Ukrainians in ten years — domestic data centers or foreign jurisdictions.
