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Short abstract

This paper examines AI data center complexes as new ecological and aesthetic wastelands. By attending to the resilient, often invasive plant species inhabiting these environments, I argue for data center landscapes as expanding wastelands harboring relentlessly vital life on a transformed Earth.

Long abstract

This paper chronicles encounters with ruderal plant species (weeds) growing in and around data center campuses. The analysis draws on field observation and site documentation conducted in northern Virginia’s “Data Center Alley” and at massive new construction projects on former mining sites in rural Appalachia. I situate these resilient plants’ lives within the wider context of data centers’ effects on soil contamination and groundwater levels and within the region’s history of ongoing extraction. I argue that the data center campus, as a site of intensive energy consumption and waste production, presents an exemplary late Anthropocene wasteland. The data center campus and its spontaneous, often invasive vegetation emerge here as successors to earlier industrial wasteland landscapes, provoking similar aesthetic negativity or indifference. In attending to the lives finding their way in these expanding wastelands, this paper asks how we might begin to reconcile ourselves to the new landscapes of a transformed Earth. It further asks whether an unchecked data center construction boom and a possible AI bubble might instead leave us with future weedy landscapes surrounding abandoned, half-built, or repurposed data centers. The presentation will include a visual element in the form of a weed herbarium containing specimens collected from data center research sites.