Disposable Data Spaces and Data Ruins

• In Event: Data Centers and Disposability

Abstract

In public and corporate imaginaries, data centres are often conceived as the infrastructural backbone of a supposed ‘4th industrial revolution’ enabled by data aggregation and increasing computation power. Yet, any industrial revolution leaves its ruins (Harvey, 2001; Mah, 2012). In this paper I focus on some of the ways in which data centres get dismantled, and disposed of by their corporate owners, and examine the kinds of ‘ruins’ that they leave behind in the local contexts in which they are situated.

Drawing upon the history of HE2, an Equinix-operated data centre located in a Second World War-shelter in Helsinki, Finland which closed down in early 2019, I illuminate the friction between the discursive and the material form of data infrastructures. Discursively, HE2 was constructed as a largely durable, innovative and environmental friendly infrastructure because of the ways in which it rerouted its residual heat into the district heating systems of Helsinki. However, for most of the time of its ten-year existence, HE2 has been unmanned, and in a process of executing a planned close down. Disposing of this data centre included the careful synchronisation of cycles of planned obsolescence of servers with the expiration of contracts with end users; of dismantling diesel generators, pipes and disposing of latent fuel, and of expanding into new spaces. The history of HE2 makes a case of data centres as mutable infrastructures that anticipate a future, and of already being the ‘data ruins’ of this future, leaving behind latent spaces and waste.

Author

• Julia Velkova, University of Helsinki, Finland