What is data center colonialism?
- Type
- Background entry
- Sources
- 8
Data center colonialism is a new frontier of settler-colonial extraction centered on land, water, and energy for corporate clouds.
Summary
In critical data-infrastructure scholarship, data center colonialism names the material and political relations behind supposedly immaterial cloud services. The emphasis is on how multinational firms and states organize land, energy, water, minerals, labor, and data through unequal systems, often externalizing ecological costs while concentrating value and control. Data centers therefore become concrete sites where digital capitalism can reproduce coloniality.
- Material infrastructureCloud computing depends on physical facilities and resource-intensive supply chains rather than existing outside geography.
- Uneven burdensCommunities and environments hosting infrastructure may absorb costs that benefit distant firms, governments, and users.
- Power and sovereigntyOwnership and control over infrastructure can affect governmental data, territorial authority, and local self-determination.
- Data center colonialism focuses on how digital infrastructure extends extractive and unequal relations into land, energy, environmental, and political systems.
- The framework treats data centers as infrastructures of multinational digital capitalism whose energy and environmental footprints are unevenly distributed.
- Project Nimbus illustrates concerns about foreign firms processing and storing governmental data within a state’s infrastructure.
Source mix
2 of 8 institutional
- 2 Journals & institutions
- 6 Other / unclassified
Deeper Insight
Data centers turn land, water and power into cloud services. The bill lands where the servers do, not where the profits go.
A data center may look like a warehouse, but it draws on land, energy, water, minerals and political power. The term data center colonialism names how firms and states can concentrate control while pushing environmental and social costs onto weaker communities. The cloud does not erase the old resource frontier. It relocates it.
- What it could changeThe framework could make infrastructure plans count local land, water and cultural costs, not just faster service.
- How it touches todayProjects in Indigenous territories, the Atacama and Pacific islands show that digital growth already reshapes physical places.
- Our futureThe cloud could keep expanding by making distant communities pay for a convenience they do not control.
- Indigenous critics describe AI data centers as a modern iteration of settler colonialism when communities sacrifice relationships to land, water, air, and nonhuman life.
- Critiques of data colonialism argue that the concept can flatten colonization’s distinct histories unless scholarship examines tangible oppression and its violent data legacy.
- In Fiji, data centers and subsea cables are read through the unequal influence of global technology firms over local telecommunications and territory.
Sources · 8
- 2 Journals & institutions
- 6 Other / unclassified
What do these mean?
- Journals & institutions. Published in a peer-reviewed journal, or from a university, government body, court or other institution.
- Other / unclassified. A site we have not classified yet. This says nothing good or bad about it.
Featured · Analysis · bristoluniversitypressdigital.com
6: Critiques of Data Colonialism in: Dialogues in Data Power
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6: Critiques of Data Colonialism in: Dialogues in Data Power Jump to Content Dialogues in Data Power Shifting Response-abilities in a Datafied World Editors: and Headings - Introduction - A second-degree extraction: on capture and colonial violence – Irene Fubara-Manuel - Behind data production for
Read sourceAnalysis · datasociety.net
Confronting Data Centers, Deep-Sea Cables, and Colonial Legacies in the South Pacific - Data & Society
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Confronting Data Centers, Deep-Sea Cables, and Colonial Legacies in the South Pacific - Data & Society # Confronting Data Centers, Deep-Sea Cables, and Colonial Legacies in the South Pacific Published on September 17, 2025 Emma Quilty Tropical paradise. Smiling faces. This is the fantasy Fiji has su
Read sourceAnalysis · democracynow.org
Data Colonialism: AI Data Centers on Indigenous Land
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“Data Colonialism”: Native Communities Fight AI Data Centers on Indigenous Land | Democracy Now! # “Data Colonialism”: Native Communities Fight AI Data Centers on Indigenous Land Story April 22, 2026 The artificial intelligence industry’s data center boom is the latest chapter in a long history of e
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