Tag: data centers

knowledge politics by Josh LepawskyAug 10, 20263:03 pm

A satellite image of a tailings pond. From this altitude the pond appears as a large white mass with a bright blue water feature at the center.

Key concept: Upstream

Data centers are becoming politically potent infrastructure. But what happens before the severs they house are even put in place?

Discard Studies by Josh LepawskyJul 23, 20261:49 pm

Paper collage. A photograph of the Atomium in Brussels, cut into diagonal strips and reassembled over a grid of numbers.

PFAS and Geographies of Forever: semiconductor and data centre edition

I’ve just finished reading two important write-ups done for Chips Communities United on the use of PFAS chemicals in the tech sector, one about their presence in wastewater outflows from a semiconductor manufacturing site in Washington state (Siegel 2026b) and another about their use for cooling of data centres (Siegel 2026a). There’s a lot going on in both of these write-ups, so I want to draw out a few key points from each of them.

data by Josh LepawskyJan 21, 20265:20 pm

An animated time lapse of landscape change between the years 1990 and 2025. The major change demonstrated is from farmland to data center.

A recipe for finding and mapping data centres

Geographers like me are really interested in understanding landscape changes. I’ve been doing some research on how the infrastructure of digital life (e.g., data centers or semiconductor fabs) is inscribed into real locations, what that […]

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