Cloud ruins: Ericsson's Vaudreuil-Dorion data centre and infrastructural abandonment

Abstract

ABSTRACT The past decade has seen the accelerated growth and expansion of large-scale data centre operations across the world to support emerging consumer and business data and computation needs. Built out rapidly, these emergent digital infrastructures carry the promise for new local industrial futures, all while their paths to obsolescence are shortened. Their lifespans are dependent on financial speculation, shifting corporate strategies, and advances in consumer technology. In this article we track the promise and afterlife of an abruptly abandoned data centre constructed by the global telecom giant Ericsson in Vaudreuil-Dorion, a town near Montréal, Québec, Canada, in order to expand emergent debates about digital ruination. Employing site visits, press reports, and qualitative interviews with architects and staff involved with the data centre's development in Sweden and Canada, we propose ‘cloud ruins’ as a sensitising concept to capture some of the specific meanings and material articulations that the abandonment of global data infrastructures may evoke in local contexts. Simultaneously familiar and novel, cloud ruins anticipate an emergent landscape of post-digital ruination that unfolds in the built environment in peripheral communities, part of the global logistical cities from within which our contemporary understandings of digitalisation are produced.