Inventorying data: circumvented investment conditions by Big Tech’s supply chain capitalism

The capital success of multinational tech companies is usually understood to be a result of innovative business models that offer free user access to digital services in return for data. This article shows that besides platformization, the political, economic, and cultural embedding of multinational tech companies depends on the specific ways in which datacenters are established locally. Our ethnographic study of a hyperscale datacenter demonstrates that major local capital investment made it possible for Meta to establish itself as a data producing company in Denmark. Investment conditioned on local political trust in industrial integrity is a process that makes the datacenter a site where data can become a product and thus capital value in the Big Tech supply chain. We theorize this process as inventorying. Implications of the analysis are twofold: First, the concept of inventorying extends the understanding of how data become valuable beyond platformization as it highlights the social, cultural, and political context that continues to enable monopolization of the digital economy. Second, it shows how even a heavily regulated welfare state has few mechanisms to hold big tech companies accountable in terms of their promises of democratic, sustainable, and welfare-political engagements.