This working paper interrogates the relationship between territory, technology, and sovereignty in the digital era, challenging the widespread assumption that digital platforms are inherently placeless and thus corrosive of territorial power. It questions some of the dominant spatial images that have come to pervade our imaginary of the digital era — such as the notions of ‘cloud’ and ‘stack’ — highlighting how they combine to present digital technology as virtual and de-territorialised, thereby overlooking the intertwining of digital and territorial power. To address these conceptual limits, which also constrain our political imagination, the article proposes a ‘re-grounded’ conception of digital sovereignty — understood not as autarkic containment but as relational and technologically enabled ’embedded autonomy’ — and introduces the notion of ‘clouded territories’ to capture how contemporary space is simultaneously layered (vertically, by digital stacks) and fragmented (horizontally, by persistent jurisdictional borders). It concludes that a perceptive political strategy in this conjuncture needs to account for the ‘sharding’ effect produced by encounter between the vertical and horizontal dimensions of contemporary power structures.