Retrofitting and ruining: Bunkered data centers in and out of time

Abstract

The political economy of the “cloud” depends on the continuous transformation of physical space to support the flow of digital commodities. Retrofitting disused infrastructure has been one of the strategies of data center operators to gain cheap access to such space. Tracking the temporal story of a retrofitted bunker in Helsinki, Finland, its conversion into a data center, and its subsequent dismantling, this article advocates for a processual perspective on data centers that does not take for granted their endurance and solidity, but instead sees them as processes of constant assembly and disassembly that interfere with multiple temporalities. I show how data center retrofitting intersects with and reforms multiple layers of historically entangled urban systems, while ruination stresses the fragility and provisional nature of these transformations, allowing to raise questions about the politics and ethics of data center dismantling that articulate data centers as a relevant object for discard studies.