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Paper short abstract

Cloud computing in cities relies on resource-intensive data centers in climate-vulnerable peripheries. Cases from Germany and Spain illustrate the toxic footprint and reorganization of especially rural ‘back end’ spaces that fuel urban cloud infrastructures and economic policies.

Paper long abstract

Big Tech corporations like Amazon and its subsidiary Amazon Web Services (AWS) are increasingly involved in public–private urban infrastructure projects. Their technologies have become the backbone of states’ administration, providing the public sector with cloud computing services. In 2026, for example, AWS has launched a “European Sovereign Cloud” with investments in the state of Brandenburg's data center landscape in cooperation with the German government. Near Berlin, AWS leverages regional cluster politics designed to attract Big Tech and position the German capital at the forefront of European cloud developments. In Aragón, Spain, AWS is similarly building the continent’s largest data-technology hub around promises of economic growth and technology-based resilience for urban areas such as Zaragoza.

Following these two cases, our ethnographic research explores how cloud computing in cities relies on peripheral data centers that consume large amounts of water and energy in toxic environments already strongly affected by the climate crisis. We analyze the exploitative relations between headquarter tech campuses and processing margins as a front end/back end configuration that resembles software/hardware architectures in the ever-present computing of modern urbanism. Drawing on Urban Political Ecology and STS, our findings let local decision-makers, water, and protesters speak alike. How are public data, environmental and social responsibilities privatized and depoliticized through techno-solutionist promises? For whose benefit and to whose loss? Analyzing unjust geographies of polluted back ends and representative front-end developments, we critically conceptualize a digital-material “cloud-city” urbanism and shed light on environments and resistances of communities in its shadows.