The digital-urban frontier in China: Data centres, extraction and the state in peripheral places
研究中国欠发达省份两个数据中心集群，分析其作为“数字城市前沿”如何与城市发展交织，揭示边缘地区在数字经济中的被提取与边缘化，以及国家、资本和基础设施的复杂互动。
The expansion of data centres to global, national and local peripheries necessitates research into their impacts on host places. To this end, this paper analyzes two data centre clusters in less developed provinces in China, which are designated under the country’s ‘Eastern Data, Western Computing’ (EDWC) programme. This paper understands these two places as ‘the digital-urban frontier’, where data centre development is entangled with urban development. This frontier endures multiple forms of extraction and remains marginalized within the rapidly growing digital economy, despite its importance to cloud computing – the backbone of that economy. By examining the role of the state, which encompasses both regulatory and facilitative elements and varies between the central and local levels of government, this paper argues that the transformation of peripheral places into the digital-urban frontier is driven by profit-maximizing companies, facilitated by the simultaneously anchored yet placeless nature of data centres and further shaped by statecraft that takes an anticipatory approach to data centre development. In doing so, this paper presents data centres, a form of digital infrastructure, as a fertile ground to research the complex relationships among extractivism, infrastructural development and state-capital relations.