Educational institutions increasingly depend on digital infrastructures to function. Cloud-based platforms and services permeate every aspect of education, from teaching and learning to administrative tasks. There is significant evidence of the increased ‘platformization’ of education but still limited large-scale data on the adoption of educational platforms, particularly in the Global South. The consequences of platformization can be positive, such as when it facilitates access to education. However, when provided by big tech, proprietary platforms extract and process data and metadata from educational actors, with consequences for autonomy, privacy, and sovereignty. In this article, we present novel large-scale data on the association between big tech and higher education institutions in Africa and Latin America. The data indicate that 59% of valid institutional domains in Africa are associated with Google or Microsoft, and in Latin America, this number reaches 76%. We discuss the implications of this data and its importance for further analysis and comparative studies, as well as its implications for the Global South in light of technological dependency and data colonialism.