From Cloud to Fog

Exploring the Rhetorical Visions and Sociotechnical Entanglements of Corporate Data Centres and Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Global tech corporations are recalibrating their sustainability ambitions as they grapple with the surging projections of digital infrastructure’s energy and resource needs associated with generative artificial intelligence. Against this backdrop, this article seeks to develop constructive cross-fertilisation between STS and scholarship in de-/post growth by exploring changing parameters for digital sustainability discourses. We document eight ‘rhetorical visions’ by which Big Tech and other tech actors rhetorically reconcile digital and economic growth trajectories with sustainability. Together these visions ostensibly render sustainability both legible, measurable, and attainable, but they increasingly also precondition sustainability on continued expansion of digital infrastructure and products. Accordingly, to the extent that data centres are a focus point for making sustainability visible, we may say that yesterday’s ‘clouds’ are giving way to a kind of ‘fog’: elusive yet grounded and palpable in the literal sense, while offering veiled and fuzzy legibility of digital extractivism in the metaphorical one.