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Short abstract:

Hyperscale datacentres are rarely problematised in the municipalities where they are built and function. By listening to the silence around a datacentre, soon becoming a ‘datacentre region’ in Denmark, we show that potentials and limits for place-based engagements are designed before construction.

Long abstract:

Big Tech’s hyperscale datacentres are built in a variety of landscapes often mobilised via public/private and transnational partnerships, national digitalisation strategies and major investments. Curiously, their impacts to both livelihoods and environments, datacentres are rarely problematised in the municipalities where they are built and function. Why, we ask, do these hyperscale structures not attract more attention in Denmark, where 9 have been built or are in process?

Much work, politics and resource go into building them, but as we show there is more to a hyperscale datacentre than strategy, planning, and global collaboration. Datacentres form a lens into the uneventful, a public, yet not problematized political issue. Our empirical investigation begins with a Meta datacentre in Denmark which despite public attention to it business model and energy consumption is locally somewhat of an un-event. Local utility engineers voice concerns around infrastructural connections, but the resource transformation of the local landscape is not a public issue. We draw on the anthropology of silence to establish a counterpoint to the panel’s suggestion that STS is well-positioned to develop ‘listening techniques’ to sound the composite nature of place. Our analysis shows that to make datacentres politically relevant we need to sound behind the scenes concerns by builders, engineers, a forgotten forest, and surplus light. It shows that potentials and limits for place-based engagements are designed from the outset before construction. To test this point. we compare with Microsoft’s current attempts at what they refer to as ‘leapfrogging’ a Danish datacentre region.