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Short abstract:

This paper explores speculative data projects in outer space and what they reveal about the incoherent fantasies of hyperscaled and hyperoptimised computing.

Long abstract:

In the past decade, an increasing number of public and private actors have laid claim to outer space through various speculative data projects, from Amazon’s space-based content delivery network to Thales’ plans for a lunar data centre. This paper explores these infrastructural developments and what they reveal about the incoherent fantasies of hyperscaled and hyperoptimised computing. The exaggerated and pre-emptive claims of particular data futures foreground, in particular, the continual work done to uphold specific capitalist and colonial logics underlying many expansionist projects today. These speculative infrastructural claims furthermore intersects with the longstanding discourse on the multi-scalar examination of infrastructures. The vastness of outer space and its disruption of human-centric measures of scale invites reflection on concepts such as local, regional, global, interplanetary, and intergalactic—and thus of governance and how we approach the idea of the commons. As infrastructure studies has shown, all infrastructure brings into question of who benefits and who does not; who has a say and who are excluded. Learning from infrastructural injustices in our terrestrial world, such as railways that were instruments of land grabs, to the telecommunication structures that perpetuates colonial relationalities today, this paper examines what cosmic infrastructures can tell us about the power struggles underlying hyperscale computing dreams of tomorrow.