Material Infrastructures

Big data tends to appear at the interface as an abstraction, even as its scale makes increasingly substantial material demands. Storage, computation, and transmission depend on hyperscale data centres, electrical grids, cooling and water systems, and fibre networks. Decomposing these infrastructures leads further to processors and storage hardware, semiconductor fabrication, critical minerals, manufacturing, and global supply chains. Material Infrastructures treats these dependencies as constitutive conditions of digital information, bringing the physical and institutional arrangements that sustain computation into the same field of inquiry. Source criticism at this scale must account for the conditions under which information can be stored, processed, moved, and retrieved.

Data energetics examines one dimension of this materiality by tracing the relationship among computational scale, efficiency, and energy demand. More data do not translate straightforwardly into proportionately greater consumption. Between 2010 and 2018, global data-centre storage capacity increased twenty-fivefold while watts per unit of storage fell by a factor of nine. Such gains matter, but their significance depends on how they interact with expanding demand, increasingly intensive forms of computation, and the concentration of storage and processing in hyperscale facilities. The problem then becomes one of understanding efficiency and expansion together.

The same concentration brings ownership and political economy directly into the material history of information. Web 2.0 concentrated enormous quantities of storage and computation among a small number of cloud and technology firms; large-scale AI is intensifying demand for specialized processors, electricity, cooling capacity, data-centre construction, and the critical minerals and supply chains required to produce advanced computing systems. BDSL examines how ownership, capital, industrial policy, jurisdiction, and geopolitics enter into the same infrastructural arrangements as servers, fibre, electricity, water, and hardware. The material conditions of digital information extend from the resources from which computing systems are made to the institutions capable of financing, building, and governing them.