FCJ-220 Imperial Infrastructures and Asia beyond Asia: Data Centres, State Formation and the Territoriality of Logistical Media

Abstract

This article examines the growth over the past decade in the construction of data centres in the Asian region. Also known as colocation centres or server farms, data centres integrate society with an economy whose technical infrastructure is defined by storage, processing and transmission. Less focussed on the scale of the computational city, the territoriality of data is such that in terms of technical operations, labour performance and the materiality of data the locational specificity of ‘Asia’ is brought into question. Moreover, the capacity of data centres to operate as sovereign entities external to or in conjunction with the state can be understood as a form of infrastructural imperialism. A focus on infrastructure as it bears upon the composition and territorial scope of the state unshackles state formation from classical varieties of political thought and social imaginaries that assume territory and state as tied to the geographic borders of the nation. The article considers the implications of thinking Asia through the infrastructure of data centres, arguing that the territoriality of data contests the territory of sovereign states in Asia and beyond.

Keywords

• data centres
• Asia
• server farms
• data
• infrastructure
• territoriality
• logistical media
• logistics