Futuring the Cloud: An Ethnographic Study of Critical Data Center Infrastructure Growth, Environmental Threat, and Community Risk

Zander, Madelyn L.

Graduate Thesis Or Dissertation

Futuring the Cloud: An Ethnographic Study of Critical Data Center Infrastructure Growth, Environmental Threat, and Community Risk Public Deposited

Analytics

Citations

Citeable URL: https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/graduate_thesis_or_dissertations/v979v4911

Abstract

This dissertation ethnographically examines the rapid expansion of critical data center infrastructure and its accompanying sociotechnical imaginaries to demonstrate how the infrastructure interacts with political, environmental, and economic concerns. Two and a half years of fieldwork in the Northern Virginia region in the United States, a prime but contested and internationally recognized location for data centers, animates these concerns and shows how global and national desires play out on a state and community stage. Through semi-structured interviews, participant observation, examination of historical accounts, and policy and document analysis, I attend to the material and political realities of data centers. I identify sociotechnical imaginaries at the U.S. national and Virginia-state levels that serve as a logic to allow data center infrastructure to expand with few checks and balances. At the national level, data centers are envisioned to enable national security, economic security, and innovative AI futures. Virginia-state actors envision data centers as a path toward securing status as a global leader in digital infrastructure and economic stability brought by the financial returns of data centers. These imaginaries currently mediate public understanding of the consequences and benefits of data centers, in some cases, problematically. Can the energy grid keep pace with data center growth? Can the industry remedy an alarming shortage of a skilled and available workforce?

I bring those dominant imaginaries into conversation with alternative community level imaginaries of “the cloud” at the site of a controversial proposal for the largest data center development in the world. Community imaginaries highlight the emerging tensions and challenges posed by data center growth; although some community members envision economically promising futures brought by data centers, others rely on their everyday experiences of living alongside the “infrastructuring” of the cloud to offer alternative visions of data center futures. These alternative futures include threats to the environment, concerns about resource availability like energy and water, historical preservation, and quality of life. These community perspectives are presently missing from dominant data center imaginaries. I argue for the need to consider the counternarratives of the cloud and to recognize the limits of presently dominant cloud imaginaries. To do so will enable more effective engagement with the consequences of data growth and the overall sustainability of the underlying infrastructure.

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