Hallucinating Data Factories
9 November 2024
As the bus exits the A7 motorway, our guide excitedly instructs us to look around. Underneath us, an impressive dyke separates the old from the new land, which is visibly lower than what lies behind us.
Reclaimed from the Sea in the early 1930s, the Wieringmeerpolder was designed to provide additional fertile ground for the land-hungry Dutch agriculture sector. Almost a century later, a new industry is steadily expanding its foothold on this peculiar territory situated 5 metres below sea level.
99 wind turbines to power the Cloud
With pairs of comically oversized exhaust pipes pointing towards the sky and enormous stacks of grey cooling aggregates flanking its sides, AMS09 resembles a child's drawing of an exaggerated, imaginary factory. Despite being painted in a variation of “Go Away Green”, a colour engineered by Disney to draw visitors’ gazes away from technical facilities across its amusement parks, the building miserably fails to blend in with its surroundings.
Surrounded by eight similar-looking structures in its immediate vicinity, AMS09 belongs to one of Europe’s largest hyperscale data centres, operated by Microsoft. Further down the road, the Big Tech giant recently completed two additional data centres (painted in dark blue with splashes of colours as a nod to the local tulip industry). Soon, the plot next to it will be transformed into power-hungry, thirsty data factory as well. On the other side of the motorway, competitor Google established itself five years ago, opting for a different shade of blue to blend into the (sometimes) blue sky.
Human for scale
The origin story of the area’s sprawling data centre industry is littered with convoluted elements of greenwashing (flawed assumptions about a ‘symbiosis’ between fossil fuel-powered bell pepper green houses and data centres), false promises (renewable wind energy for hundreds of thousands of households sucked up by Microsoft and Google) and hubris by local political elites courted by Silicon Valley grandstanding.
Residual soil, not heated by data centres.
The developments witnessed in the Wieringermeerpolder are emblematic for the struggles faced by hundreds of communities around the world. While the Dutch public, supported by investigative journalists and clear-eyed politicians, has been increasingly successful in their resistance towards new mega computing factories, others are just starting to organise.
Meanwhile, AMS09 and its sister buildings keep happily humming away, transforming much needed wind energy and drinking water into a toxic mix of hallucinated Potemkin knowledge for the masses, polluted waste water and literal hot air.
The visit took place in the context of the second iteration of the Data Centre Tour organised by The Hmm and Marloes de Valk, a software artist, writer, and PhD researcher. Speakers included Lars Ruiter, a young local councillor who became increasingly critical towards the expansion of data centres in his municipality, and artists anna andrejew, Ola Bonati and Leo Scarin.
Hallucinating Data Factories
9 November 2024
As the bus exits the A7 motorway, our guide excitedly instructs us to look around. Underneath us, an impressive dyke separates the old from the new land, which is visibly lower than what lies behind us.
Reclaimed from the Sea in the early 1930s, the Wieringmeerpolder was designed to provide additional fertile ground for the land-hungry Dutch agriculture sector. Almost a century later, a new industry is steadily expanding its foothold on this peculiar territory situated 5 metres below sea level.
99 wind turbines to power the Cloud
With pairs of comically oversized exhaust pipes pointing towards the sky and enormous stacks of grey cooling aggregates flanking its sides, AMS09 resembles a child's drawing of an exaggerated, imaginary factory. Despite being painted in a variation of “Go Away Green”, a colour engineered by Disney to draw visitors’ gazes away from technical facilities across its amusement parks, the building miserably fails to blend in with its surroundings.
Surrounded by eight similar-looking structures in its immediate vicinity, AMS09 belongs to one of Europe’s largest hyperscale data centres, operated by Microsoft. Further down the road, the Big Tech giant recently completed two additional data centres (painted in dark blue with splashes of colours as a nod to the local tulip industry). Soon, the plot next to it will be transformed into power-hungry, thirsty data factory as well. On the other side of the motorway, competitor Google established itself five years ago, opting for a different shade of blue to blend into the (sometimes) blue sky.
Human for scale
The origin story of the area’s sprawling data centre industry is littered with convoluted elements of greenwashing (flawed assumptions about a ‘symbiosis’ between fossil fuel-powered bell pepper green houses and data centres), false promises (renewable wind energy for hundreds of thousands of households sucked up by Microsoft and Google) and hubris by local political elites courted by Silicon Valley grandstanding.
Residual soil, not heated by data centres.
The developments witnessed in the Wieringermeerpolder are emblematic for the struggles faced by hundreds of communities around the world. While the Dutch public, supported by investigative journalists and clear-eyed politicians, has been increasingly successful in their resistance towards new mega computing factories, others are just starting to organise.
Meanwhile, AMS09 and its sister buildings keep happily humming away, transforming much needed wind energy and drinking water into a toxic mix of hallucinated Potemkin knowledge for the masses, polluted waste water and literal hot air.
The visit took place in the context of the second iteration of the Data Centre Tour organised by The Hmm and Marloes de Valk, a software artist, writer, and PhD researcher. Speakers included Lars Ruiter, a young local councillor who became increasingly critical towards the expansion of data centres in his municipality, and artists anna andrejew, Ola Bonati and Leo Scarin.