Climate extraction and supply chains of data

Abstract

The global data center industry relies on what this article defines as ‘climate extraction’. Through this peculiar but critical infrastructure for global Internet operations, a focus on Ireland reveals the entanglements of state, corporate, and environmental actors within the extractive calculations of transnational companies. Ireland has been advertised to and by data center developers because of its ‘cool’ climate while downplaying the importance of its low corporate tax rate and the government and planning system’s favorable treatment of big tech companies. Public discourses around big tech ‘greenwash’ power and contribute to a material climate (both atmospheric and infrastructural) from which value can be extracted. This is achieved by extracting for and from data circulation through the built and ‘natural’ environment. This article articulates the ways in which the spatial development of data centers as ‘strategic infrastructure’ contributes to the ongoing naturalization of capital and state power’s entanglements with the so-called natural world through technological systems.