The digital-urban frontier in China: Data centres, extraction and the state in peripheral places

The expansion of data centres to global, national and local peripheries necessitates research into their impacts on host places. To this end, this paper analyzes two data centre clusters in less developed provinces in China, which are designated under the country’s ‘Eastern Data, Western Computing’ (EDWC) programme. This paper understands these two places as ‘the digital-urban frontier’, where data centre development is entangled with urban development. This frontier endures multiple forms of extraction and remains marginalized within the rapidly growing digital economy, despite its importance to cloud computing – the backbone of that economy. By examining the role of the state, which encompasses both regulatory and facilitative elements and varies between the central and local levels of government, this paper argues that the transformation of peripheral places into the digital-urban frontier is driven by profit-maximizing companies, facilitated by the simultaneously anchored yet placeless nature of data centres and further shaped by statecraft that takes an anticipatory approach to data centre development. In doing so, this paper presents data centres, a form of digital infrastructure, as a fertile ground to research the complex relationships among extractivism, infrastructural development and state-capital relations.