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Short abstract

This paper explores the growing contestations around data centers in Ireland and France. It argues that these contestations allow us to understand the material, yet often unacknowledged left-behinds of digital innovation, making data centers a focal point for pressing technopolitical questions.

Long abstract

What we commonly call 'the digital' – often evoked through metaphors such as 'the cloud' or 'the virtual' which suggest the opposite – is anything but immaterial or placeless. Data centres, key nodes in the "global assemblage of digital flows" (Graham, 2014), demonstrate this realization. As the material infrastructures of digitalization and Aritifical Intelligence, they become one of the foremost sites for observing and experiencing the heterogeneous materialities of ‘the digital’. They require large amounts of energy and water, rely on rare earths used in servers, generate waste heat and e-waste, and store ever-growing volumes of partially unused data. As such, they are deeply material, locally embedded — and increasingly become sites and objects of contestation.

This paper takes contestations around data centres in Ireland and France as an entry point for examining the diverse left-behinds of digital innovation (Felt, 2025). Rather than treating such contestation merely as opposition, I approach it as a lens for understanding how the materialities and consequences of digital infrastructures become (technopolitical) problems (Callon, 2009). How are data centres problematized by those who contest them? What kinds of solutions are proposed? What publics emerge, and through which channels do they articulate their concerns? By examining different forms of contestation, the paper explores what they reveal about how questions of sustainability, the climate crisis, democracy, and justice become articulated around infrastructures of 'the digital'.

The analysis draws on fieldwork conducted with Ulrike Felt (PI) in the ERC-funded project Innovation Residues(GA 1010545).