In Nederland komen steeds meer datacenters, maar ze leggen een enorm beslag op ons elektriciteitsnetwerk. De grootste datacenters van ons land gebruiken net zoveel stroom als bijna een kwart van alle woningen. Ook de opkomst van AI speelt een rol in de komst van deze datacenters. Hoe neemt data technologie de wereld over, en met welke gevolgen? Fieke Jansen, assistant professor en medeoprichter van het Critical Infrastructure Lab aan de telefoon, en Pieter Sellies, campaigner datacenters bij Fossielvrij, spraken erover bij Met Clarice!

The European Commission says expanding AI infrastructure is essential to Europe’s technological sovereignty. Yet, it has not shown why Europe needs to triple data center capacity, nor how existing infrastructure is being used, nor how rapid expansion can be reconciled with Europe’s climate, energy and democratic commitments.

There is no solid evidence for the need to triple data center capacity, with evidence to suggest that many data centers in Europe are underutilized and that new data center development will be dominated by US tech and co-location firms who prioritize serving the largest multinational corporate cloud providers, most of which are US-based.

Nevertheless, the European Commission is aggressively dismantling environmental protections and democratic oversight to achieve this target. Read more.

Fieke Jansen, onderzoeker aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam en leider van het Critical Infrastructure Lab, brengt de volledige materiële keten achter Artificial Intelligence in kaart: van kobaltmijnen in Congo tot e-waste in Ghana. Het probleem is dat de discussie over AI-infrastructuur vrijwel altijd gaat over groei, terwijl de vragen over verdeling, toegang en publieke belangen nauwelijks worden gesteld. Ze laat zien waarom efficiëntie het probleem niet oplost — meer efficiëntie leidt tot meer gebruik, niet minder — en waarom AI als klimaatoplossing vaak een manier is om structurele verandering uit te stellen.

In Noord-Holland verbruikt één hyperscaler evenveel energie als alle Amsterdamse huishoudens samen, terwijl gemeentes geen wegingskader hebben om te sturen op gebruik. Morgen kun je beginnen met drie vragen bij elk AI-gebruik: staat dit gehost bij een Europese partij, is generatieve Artificial Intelligence hier echt nodig of volstaat een kleiner model, en wat is de netto milieuimpact inclusief het energieverbruik van de AI zelf?

critical infrastructure lab at the University of Amsterdam
Centre for Internet and Society at CNRS
Inria
University of Lille

In the geopolitical race for technological hegemony, regimes are using digital sovereignty policies to enact control and grow their own digital economy. A central element of these industrial policies is the creation of an enabling environment for infrastructural expansion: targeted investment in the technology sector, deprioritization of environmental and social protection, and creation of new electricity infrastructures are all meant to underwrite the build-out of submarine cables, data centres, telecommunication infrastructures, and satellite constellations. Industrial policies are proposed to derisk supply chains on which national and economic security depend.  Infrastructure space itself becomes a medium of statecraft (Easterling 2014),  where power is reconfigured through design, finance, technology, and circulation.

The world becomes ever further enmeshed in a circulation complex that both encases nature and society for generations to come. In this workshop, circulation offers a lens to understand both the workings of the entire market and its relation to that of specific industries (Kjøsen 2018). It allows for theorization about how the externalisation of costs, regulatory capture, corporate power, and the generation of financial power that propels infrastructural expansion outward and downward, from the seabed to low earth orbit, and how these dynamics are encoded into routing decisions, protocol design, and systems architecture.

Topics of Interest

In this second infrastructure workshop, we are interested in thinking through the consequences of the increasing private ownership of expanding communication infrastructure from the sea to the sky and methods of measuring it. We attend to the territories, people, natural resources, and environments being sacrificed in the name of progress, economic growth, and control (Mollen et al. 2026), the violence that circulation and logistics carry with them (Cowen 2014), and critical quantitative and qualitative methods to foreground underpinning patterns. We ask what technical inquiry can reveal that other approaches cannot: how the measurement of interconnection and autonomous systems exposes the concentration of ownership; how the materiality of compute, spectrum, and orbit decides who gets to build and who does not; and how shifting ownership structures and modalities translate, operationally, across submarine cables, data centres, and low-orbit satellites. We therefore welcome contributions that bring network measurement, systems design, and security research into contact with political economy and critical theory, alongside work that asks how people engage with and contest these configurations, whether alternative architectures are possible, and what it is that we want from our communication infrastructures in the first place.

Themes and topics

The 2nd INFRASTRUCTURE Workshop brings together researchers from Science and Technology Studies (STS), Political Economy, Social and Human Geography, Computer Science, and related fields to critically examine the material, environmental, political, and socio-technical foundations of today’s computing systems. We invite contributions that address, but are not limited to:

• Sea, land, and sky as infrastructural frontiers: submarine cables, terrestrial data centres, and low-orbit satellite constellations as sites of expansion, and how the three domains are being knitted into a single circulation complex.
• Infrastructure as asset class: the financialisation of connectivity and computation; firms as financial instruments and infrastructures as investment objects; venture capital, private equity, and the conditions of public listings.
• Externalisation and its costs: the environmental, territorial, and labour costs displaced onto people, ecologies, and resources; energy and water demand, mineral extraction, and land use; regulatory capture and algorithmic control as mechanisms of cost-shifting.
• Digital sovereignty as industrial policy: state investment, deregulation, and subsidy regimes that build an enabling environment for expansion; the US-China race for technological hegemony and its peripheries.
• Circulation as concept and method: theoretical and empirical engagements with circulation (Kjøsen 2018; Dyer-Witheford and Mularoni 2025); the circuit linking labour, data, advertising, logistics, and the production of desire; and what the concept reveals that other frames miss.
• Logistics, ownership, and the state: logistical power and the violence of global trade (Cowen 2014); shifting ownership structures across cables, data centres, and satellites; public, private, and hybrid arrangements; and the material limits of sovereignty claims.
• The stack as a site of power: routing and peering, protocol standards, autonomous systems, and default configurations as the places where ownership and control are quietly enacted; and what network measurement, interconnection analysis, and the study of traffic and dependency can reveal about concentration, chokepoints, and the limits of sovereignty at the technical layer.
• Counter-infrastructures and building otherwise: how engineers, communities, and publics contest, repair, and reimagine these systems; commons-based, federated, and decentralised architectures; and the technical and political conditions under which alternative designs become viable or are foreclosed.

Submission

We are looking for short position papers of about 3-pages (maximum 1500 words) that engage with infrastructural expansion and circulation. In general, a position paper outlines a stance on a particular issue or topic and provides arguments and evidence to support this view. There will be no formal presentation of the papers, but they will shape the agenda and the discussion. Following the workshop, we will discuss the possibility of a joint publication that can serve as an intervention into the field.

Submit your position papers as PDF by sending it attached to an email to submission@criticalinfralab.net with the subject line ‘[sea|land|sky] paper title’ 

Important dates

• Short Position Paper Submission Deadline: 15th September 2026
• Notification of Acceptance: 1st of November 2026
• Workshop: 28 – 29th of January 2027

Other information 

This 2nd Infrastructure workshop is hosted by the critical infrastructure lab at the University of Amsterdam. It builds on and follows from the 1st INFRASTRUCTURE Workshop organized by LS2N and CNRS.

Please note that we have limited funds to support people travelling to Amsterdam. This option is intended to support those who could not otherwise participate in the event, especially early career researchers.

References

Cowen, D. (2014). The deadly life of logistics: Mapping violence in global trade. University of Minnesota Press.

Dyer-Witheford, N., & Mularoni, A. (2025). Cybernetic circulation complex: Big tech and planetary crisis. Verso.

Easterling, K. (2014). Extrastatecraft: The power of infrastructure space. Verso.

Kjøsen, A. M. (2018). Circulation. In A. Pendakis, I. Szeman, & J. Diamanti (Eds.), The Bloomsbury companion to Marx (pp. 281–288). Bloomsbury Academic.

Mollen, A., Jansen, F., Kannengießer, S., & Velkova, J. (2026). AI infrastructures and sustainability: Expanding perspectives on automation, communication and media. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-09748-4

Steinhoff, J., Kjøsen, A. M., & Dyer-Witheford, N. (2024). Stagnation, circulation, and the automated abyss. In J. Fehrle, M. Lieber, & J. J. Ramirez (Eds.), (De)Automating the future: Marxist perspectives on capitalism and technology (pp. 288–310). Brill.

Details: June 24 12.00-14.00 at the University of Amsterdam. Please register here and we will send you the details.

About the speaker
Felipe Silva Figueiredo is a visiting researcher at the critical infrastructure lab. he is a phd student at the it university of copenhagen, in denmark. he has background in anthropology and science and technology studies. felipe’s current phd research focuses on the political ecology of data centers and energy infrastructures in iceland, and how electricity shapes the sustainability and the limits of computation. his general interests lie in the intersection between infrastructure development and environmental crisis, and ways of resisting capitalism.

During our previous walk on March 6th, we discussed the 10-year-long financial speculation over this piece of land, the layers of subcontracting that hide Microsoft as the tenant of the hyperscaler, the municipality’s zoning policy, and the implications of such a project on the health of the land, water, local residents, and on our ability to access electricity equitably.

We return to the same site two months later to check on the construction progress, as well as to continue our discussions on these topics. We will end at De Sering with a community dinner, followed by a collaborative session to exchange about ways of responding to the harmful effects of this and comparable Cloud infrastructure projects.

Registration is closed.

Fieke was interviewed by the French-German broadcaster about her data centres work at an event in Marseille: Data centers: quelle souveraineté numérique?, by ARTE

From critique to hope: Infrawalking, defamiliarisation, transgressive infrastructuring and utopian engineering, by Fieke Jansen, Maxigas, & Niels ten Oever

During this one-day event, practitioners and researchers presented their work, shared insights, and openly discussed the challenges of studying submarine cables. Together, we reflected on the availability and accessibility of data and identified possible next steps. This report provides an overview of what was discussed and what we took away from these conversations. In this report, we use the term submarine cables to refer to internet connectivity cables that traverse oceans and lakes.

Building a Shared Research Agenda on Submarine Cables by Fieke Jansen, Niels ten Oever, Dmitry Kuznetsov, Valentina Ochner, & Jane Ruffino. critical infrastructure lab document series CIL#014. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19368835

We are investigating alternative hardware from locally sourced materials, so-called ethical hardware, to develop and speculate upon renewable practices for the benefit of both nature and humans.
We are exploring different materials, sentient, low-impact, non-toxic, fair traded, recycled and urban mined means of production.

We aim to challenge the common PCB (printed circuit board) economies in an artistic, creative, positive and responsible way applying feminist hacking as an artistic methodology and critical framework.

https://feministhackerspaces.cargo.site/Clay-PCB-Tutorial – a workshop in partnership with the critical infrastructure lab and Waag from March 30 to April 2, 2026.