Paper Short Abstract:

This paper examines how the geopolitical turmoil brought by the Ukrainian war materialized on the ground in a Finnish town, hosting a Russian owned data center. This led to moral ambivalence and reorganization of relationships between the center and the municipality.

Paper Abstract:

A data center of Global DC, formerly known as Yandex Oy, is located in a small Finnish town called Mäntsälä. The ‘Russian Google’ has been providing its waste heat to the local district heating systems since its opening in 2015, forming a part of the town infrastructure by warming homes of the town residents. Initially, the Yandex data center was celebrated in Mäntsälä as a pioneer in ecological sustainability through recycling its waste heat and importantly, bringing significant tax incomes to the municipality. Then, the Russian invasion to Ukraine in March 2022 caused a sudden disruption in the relationships between the data center and the municipality.

This paper provides an example of ‘locating the geopolitical’ by tracing the affective and material effects brought by the intense geopolitical turmoil and what it meant for various actors involved in this particular context. Overnight, the geopolitical risks associated with the Russian company actualized, and the data center became an object of criticism. Its presence and role were questioned and re-evaluated, evoking moral ambivalence among the residents while complicating the daily operations of the data center. However, because of the economic and infrastructural embeddedness of the data center in Mäntsälä, no obvious solutions to the moral dilemma associated with the center were available.

Based on conversations with data center employees, local residents and decision makers of Mäntsälä, this paper examines how the dramatic change in the geopolitical situation materialized on the ground level.