DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURE is the spine of modern innovation – from the clouds that fuel e-commerce and artificial intelligence (AI), to the everyday apps. Yet, beneath the gleaming facades of hyperscale server parks lies a fast-unfolding crisis. Data centres have become the new “gold” of investment, attracting a global rush of tech giants and governments alike. But this large-scale infrastructure planning and spread carries high, underexamined costs across several fronts. Currently, cloud platforms run much of the internet, bringing each terawatt-hour of data processing from the working of coal plants, concrete cooling towers, and plunged aquifers.
As nations and corporations race to build more data centres, are we locking in ecological and social harms that our laws and institutions are ill-prepared to manage?
A global data centre rush
Tech titans and states view data centres as high-value strategic assets. The industry is already worth roughly $240 billion globally in 2024, and is projected to more than double by 2032. Hyperscale data centres are campus-scale facilities that often span hundreds of thousands of square feet, and dominate global digital infrastructure. Big tech firms like Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta have driven rapid expansion in hyperscale data centre capacity to meet the rising demand for cloud and AI services. Such facilities have not only served as passive repositories of data but have also become critical digital infrastructure underpinning national competitiveness and security.
Northern Virginia’s ‘Data Center Alley,’ the world’s largest concentration of such facilities, is an example of this shift – processing a substantial share of global internet traffic and meeting the needs of millions of users worldwide. Governments across jurisdictions are increasingly recognising data centres as strategic infrastructure rather than ordinary commercial real estate.
