DIGITALIZING THE URBAN: BIG TECHS, DATA CENTERS, AND THE SPATIALITY OF COMPUTING

Abstract

For common sense, what happens digitally often seems to take place in the air, in an ethereal, intangible environment, devoid of materiality and disconnected from the world. In a significant portion of the academic literature, the idea that space is losing its relevance in discussions of the digital is also quite recurrent. At the same time, big tech companies hide, as much as possible, the spatial dimension of their industry. This article aims to situate this spatialization and the relevance of geography within this debate, encompassing computing infrastructure — backbones, hyperscale data centers, and artificial intelligence training — as well as its environmental impacts and costs. To this end, the research was based primarily on a literature review, advancing the debate by bringing together distinct fields of study and seeking to articulate digitalization, urbanization, technological infrastructure, and spatiality. The results indicate a recent trend whereby countries in the Global South are increasingly expected to supply the natural resources, energy, and extensive land areas required to sustain computing, particularly the computational demands of AI training. In its final section, the article turns more explicitly to urban space as shaped by the dynamics of digitalization.