"Sustainability is Money": The Making of Tropical Data Centers

This talk explores how emerging standards and metrics in data center design across Southeast Asia are reshaping understandings of what a data center is and where it should be located (Kaliash and Lin, 2026). Based on preliminary ethnographic research with data center developers and scientist-entrepreneurs in Singapore and Johor, the talk shows how energy-efficiency data center standards are influencing rentier dynamics. The talk begins with a brief introduction to the widespread view that North American energy efficiency standards and metrics are applicable across regions. It then elaborates on how, through rentiership, the work of Southeast Asian data center developers and scientist-entrepreneurs both unsettles and reorients these forms of universal standardization, and the effects this has on existing social order and geopolitics. The talk ends with a speculative reflection on how concerned groups might become involved in the civic life of data centers by making visible the assumptions embedded in standards, as well as the rentier dynamics they produce and the modalities of economization that are set in motion.

The New Civic Terrains Speaker Series convenes public conversations with thinkers and practitioners working at the frontiers of digital civic life. Through lecture and dialogue, the series highlights diverse ways of knowing and making, from empirical research and policy critique to creative practice and grassroots organizing. The series creates a collective opportunity for reflection, debate, and collaboration, fostering cross-disciplinary exchange and inviting audiences to imagine new civic imaginaries for a technologically mediated world.

The Digital Civics Initiative at Northeastern University is an interdisciplinary platform dedicated to understanding and reshaping the civic dimensions of digital technologies in contemporary life. The initiative brings together scholars, educators, activists, technologists, and artists whose work engages questions of technology and education, labor and automation, governance and public institutions, surveillance and data justice, environmental sustainability, community organizing, and human-centered approaches to machine learning and artificial intelligence.

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Host or Publisher Digital Civics Initiative: Northeastern University