When do we go from here? Data center infrastructure labor,jobs,and work in economic development time and temporalities

Abstract

Regional authorities and development experts wax about data infrastructures’ importance to local labor, both in terms of modernizing the past and creating new jobs in the future. This data infrastructure time of labor and jobs establishes a temporality of a region, and its leadership, as on the way to a progressive and calculable future. Using the example of a Google hyperscale data center which leaders extolled in Groningen, in the Netherlands, we explore how data infrastructure time shapes the temporalities of the workers whose jobs were presumed to be founded and futured by this event. By exploring these relational chains of power in the political economy of data infrastructures, I illustrate the ways that work temporalities are connected to broader social, political, and ecological forces in the region, while also offering new methods in understanding what global infrastructure companies mean to regions outside of global cities.