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Short abstract:

The accumulation of data challenges the data center industry, its infrastructures, workforce as well as the spaces where the facilities are established. This talk will analyze the material and organizational practices of data centers that make the scaling-up of digital services a silent process.

Long abstract:

Scalability, security and connectivity are the main promises of the data center industry. By securing land and power, operators offer to their clients the possibility to thrive without caring for technical practicalities such as cooling of computer rooms, buying new inverters, withdrawing useless telecommunication cables or dealing with material breakdown. The efficiency of infrastructural invisibility comes at cost, which is paid locally: those facilities are more and more criticized for their power, water and land consumption, the low rate of job employment and a lack of attention of public bodies. However, far from being solely external actors’ concerns, these issues are also seen by data center operators as potential threats to their business activities and scale up promise.

This paper investigates how data accumulation challenges various actors (public services, IT corporations, colocation datacenters), questioning the material organization of their infrastructural investments. By focusing on practical operations such as cable management and server room cooling, I will show how technical and normative scaling up solutions lead a to the specialization of space and labor that progressively transformed the computer room into a modern data center facility, that is now reshaped by current hype for AI. Finally, I will claim that those scale-making practices profoundly transformed the nature data storage, challenging the relationship of the facilities with their institutional environment.