Research Seminar Series: Professor Gianluca Iazzolino

We are thrilled to invite you to the upcoming session of the Research Seminar Series at the Asia School of Business, featuring Professor Gianluca Iazzolino.

Seminar Title:

Shifting Connectivity Geographies and the Political Economy of Global Data Centre Networks

Event Details:

📅 Date: 4th March, 2026 (Wednesday)

⏰ Time: 12:30pm to 1:30pm

📍Venue: CR-W2-03, Asia School of Business

💻 Zoom Link: https://asb-my.zoom.us/j/95144324056?pwd=bpVrOCwfyF9s5AaIGozQGoun4uRZka.1

Meeting ID: 951 4432 4056

Passcode: 409638

Abstract

This presentation will discuss the rapid global expansion of data infrastructures and its implications for development, power, and sustainability. As Artificial Intelligence (AI) dominates policy and public conversations and catalyses public and private investments, the attention of scholars and activists is turning to its material backbone: data centres (DC). Although still mainly clustered in the Global North, DCs are proliferating across the Global South. Driven by the surge in data storage demand and AI's need for high-performance computing environments, DCs have become critical physical foundations of the digital economy. Market forecasts project massive growth in both capacity and investment, while public debate increasingly scrutinises their environmental and social impacts. Although roughly 11,000 facilities currently operate worldwide, they remain concentrated in advanced economies. However, recent investment trends show unprecedented construction across the Global South, propelled by expanding digital markets, latency reduction needs, data sovereignty policies, and intensifying geopolitical competition.

This expansion carries significant resource costs, including rising electricity consumption and water use, complicating sustainability commitments. Industry actors promote narratives of AI-enabled efficiency and green digital transformation, yet these claims face mounting criticism from civil society and regulators. The analysis in this research argues that, rather than closing infrastructural gaps, current expansion risks reinforcing asymmetric dependencies, enabling extractive accumulation, and shifting environmental burdens onto peripheral regions. Data centres thus emerge not only as technical assets but as political infrastructures reshaping global inequalities in the AI era.

Speaker’s Bio

Gianluca Iazzolino is a lecturer in Digital Development at the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester. His research interests lie at the intersection of development studies, political economy, and digital geography, using ethnographic methods to explore the precarious balance of inclusion and surveillance that characterises most digital development initiatives. Over the past twelve years, he has focused on how digital platforms are reshaping power dynamics and instigating new forms of organisation and practices of contestation in the Global South.

He is a PhD-holder from from the University of Edinburgh, with experience being a Research Fellow at the LSE, the University of Oxford, and the Institute of Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion (IMTFI), University of California Irvine. Previously, he has worked as a consultant for NGOs and aid organisations in Senegal, Burkina Faso and Niger, and as a freelance journalist in Africa, Central and South America, the Middle East, Russia and India.

We look forward to your participation in this insightful research seminar.

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