Presentation short abstract

Cloud computing in cities relies on resource-intensive data centers in climate-vulnerable peripheries. Cases from Germany and Spain illustrate how the digital-material metabolism of public–private infrastructure is depoliticized while it reshapes urban–rural relations.

Presentation long abstract

Big Tech corporations like Amazon and its cloud-computing subsidiary Amazon Web Services (AWS) are increasingly involved in public–private urban infrastructure projects. In May 2024, for example, AWS announced plans to invest in a “European Sovereign Cloud” in the state of Brandenburg, Germany, in cooperation with the German government. Near Berlin, AWS leverages local cluster politics designed to attract Big Tech and position the German capital at the forefront of European cloud developments. In Aragón, Spain, AWS is building the continent’s largest data-technology hub around promises of economic growth and technology-based resilience for urban areas such as Zaragoza.

Our ethnographic research in — and comparative analysis of — these cases shows how cloud computing in cities relies on peripheral data centers that consume large amounts of water and energy in territories already strongly affected by the climate crisis. We analyze the exploitative relation between cloud infrastructure and burdened, processing peripheries as a front-end/back-end configuration, resembling software/hardware architectures in the ever-present computing of modern urbanism. By following interrelated flows of local urban politics and water, we examine (I) how public data, environmental and social responsibilities are privatized and depoliticized through techno-solutionist, convenience-based imaginaries, and (II) how exchanges of flows and digital outputs reshape political-economic and socio-ecological urban-rural relations. Drawing on Urban Political Ecology and Science and Technology Studies, we critically conceptualize the digital-material metabolism of “cloud-city” urbanism and shed light on the environments and resistance of communities in its shadows.