Editors: Alberto Alemanno (HEC Paris) & Kristina Irion (University of Amsterdam)
The rapid expansion of generative AI, cloud computing and cryptocurrency is driving unprecedented demand for data centres. Governments increasingly treat these facilities as essential infrastructure and compete to attract them through accelerated permitting, public subsidies and preferential access to energy and land. At the same time, communities are beginning to contest their demands on electricity, water and territory, as well as the secrecy surrounding their environmental and fiscal consequences. Because AI is experienced as weightless – a service arriving from a ‘cloud’ – the data centre is where it becomes visible, and thus governable: the concrete object onto which every anxiety about AI’s power, ownership, externalities, accountability, and even its effects on human cognition, now attaches. To govern the data centre is, in tangible form, to govern AI itself. Precisely because it makes AI legible, the data centre has begun to gather its own field of inquiry: a growing interdisciplinary scholarship, across geography, media and science-and-technology studies, law.
This call for papers addresses these issues by unpacking the surge in data centre demand and the legal, political, and democratic challenges it raises, to inform the effort by governments at every level to balance these competing priorities. In doing so, it contributes to – and is connected to risk regulation – the emerging field of critical data centre studies, taking the data centre as more than a warehouse or a ‘cloud’, a site where efficiency, policy, popular culture, planetary devastation and potentially cognitive offloading converge.
EJRR is a interdisciplinary, double blind peer reviewed and open access journal published by Cambridge University Press.
The first deadline for a 500 words abstract is 1 October 2026.
Please consult the Call for Papers for more details.