The New Infrastructural Order
Looking at How Digital Industries are Rewiring Land, Power, and Resources
We’re in the middle of a massive buildout of digital infrastructure. From data centers and semiconductor factories to power grids and industrial zones, governments and corporations are pouring billions into the systems that sustain the digital economy. But this isn’t just about technology—it’s about land, energy, and power in the broadest sense.
Through boom and bust, this dynamic has been unfolding for decades. Writing before and after the dot-com and telecom crashes, Annalee Saxenian documented how Silicon Valley’s rise was not just about technological breakthroughs but about regional economic transformation, networked production, and the decentralization of innovation.1 Saskia Sassen explored the emergence of a new socio-spatial order, where cities became command centers for global capital, shaped by flows of finance, technology, and transnational corporate networks.2 Manuel Castells theorized the Network Society, describing how economic and political power is increasingly organized through global information flows rather than territorial boundaries—a dynamic that prefigured today’s digital governance structures.3
Behind every AI model, online service, or financial transaction, there’s an entire physical network of buildings, machines, and supply chains making it possible. The race to control this infrastructure—who builds it, where it’s located, and who benefits—isn’t just shaping industries; it’s remaking landscapes, redistributing resources, and driving geopolitical tensions.
This surge in infrastructure spending isn’t just about staying competitive. It’s a strategic move by governments to secure control over essential industries like semiconductors, energy grids, and high-tech manufacturing. The U.S. CHIPS Act, Europe’s push for digital sovereignty, and the scramble for AI-ready data centers all reveal the same trend: states and firms are making big bets on technology, and those bets come with consequences for land, resources, and local communities.
Yet, most of the conversation around this transformation focuses on who is winning the tech race—which country is leading in AI, which company is dominating the semiconductor industry. What’s missing is a deeper look at what’s actually happening on the ground:
Where does the electricity, water, and land come from to support these massive digital industries?
How are data centers and high-tech factories reshaping cities, rural areas, and entire economies?
Who benefits from this boom, and who bears the costs?
These are the questions Techno-Statecraft will explore—not just by analyzing policies and investments, but by examining how states and corporations use infrastructure as a tool of power, reshaping land, resources, and governance to sustain and expand the digital economy.
Most people think about infrastructure in the abstract—as something that’s just there, working in the background. But infrastructure is never neutral. It’s about control, competition, and trade-offs. It is the medium through which states and corporations exert power, shaping economies, environments, and territorial governance. This interplay of technology and state intervention—what I call techno-statecraft—is central to understanding how infrastructure is built, who benefits, and who is left behind.
Take data centers, for example. Every time we stream a movie, send an email, or run an AI model, that information is stored and processed in huge, warehouse-like buildings packed with servers. These facilities require massive amounts of electricity and water to stay cool, and they’re often built in places where those resources are already scarce. Their placement and operation aren’t just technical decisions; they reflect negotiations between corporate interests, state incentives, and the physical limits of land and energy systems.
Semiconductor factories, hailed as the “humanity's great technological and scientific achievements” or the “the human spirit incarnate” by some commentators, are some of the most resource-intensive facilities on the planet. In regions like Arizona, where water is limited, the decision to build new chip fabs isn’t just about economic growth—it’s about deciding who gets access to water and how land is used.
Data centers, once thought of as an invisible part of the internet, are now sprawling across rural areas and industrial zones, driving up electricity and water demand and pulling resources away from other industries.
Governments are back in the business of industrial planning, offering subsidies and tax breaks to companies that promise to build key infrastructure. But these deals often come with hidden costs, from increased environmental impact to weakened local oversight.
At its core, this moment isn’t just about technology advancing. It’s about how governments, corporations, and industries are reordering land, labor, and resources to keep digital economies running. And those decisions have real consequences.
My approach to these issues is critical but grounded, bridging political economy, urban planning, and political ecology. Techno-statecraft is about understanding how economic and geopolitical forces take material form—whether in the siting of an industrial corridor, the redirection of an energy grid, or the reclassification of land to serve digital industries. By tracing who builds, who governs, and who extracts, I examine the deeper structures that shape the landscapes of digital capitalism.
This publication is about making sense of the infrastructure boom happening all around us—not just as a technological shift, but as a political, economic, and environmental transformation.
Here’s what you can expect to see covered:
The global race to build digital infrastructure – Why governments are investing in semiconductors, AI data centers, and high-tech industrial zones, and what that means for the future.
How data centers, factories, and energy grids are reshaping land and resources—Who controls them, who benefits, and who pays the price.
The political and economic forces behind the infrastructure boom—Why states and corporations are making big moves in these industries, and what trade-offs they’re making along the way.
The real-world impact of these projects on cities, rural areas, and the environment—How infrastructure decisions are shaping everything from energy grids to water supplies to regional economies.
How infrastructure is becoming a new arena for global competition—Why countries are racing to secure access to key industries and how that is reshaping power at every level, from local to international.
How territorial governance is shifting to accommodate these industries—How planning, zoning, and industrial policy are being rewritten in response to digital infrastructure demands.
Why does this matter now?
Because the choices being made today—where factories are built, where energy grids are expanded, who gets access to resources—will define the shape of economies, cities, and global politics for decades to come. The infrastructure that supports digital economies isn’t just growing—it’s concentrating power in new ways, making some places winners and others collateral damage.
By looking at these trends through the lens of geopolitics, economics, and environmental change, Techno-Statecraft will help untangle the forces shaping our world and what they mean for the future.
Annalee Saxenian, Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); Saxenian, The New Argonauts: Regional Advantage in a Global Economy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991); Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).
Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1996).
I am really interested in this. We talk all the time about 'the cloud' but the nuts and bolts of this are undersea cables, banks of servers guzzling electricity, pylons and mobile phone masts dotted across the landscape and the mines across the globe from Congo to the Ukraine, the ships criss crossing the globe to ship the materials to make the semi conductors, the child labourers who make the phones and computers (mainly in the Global South).
I am minded to think of the famouse Blake painting, from the front Lucifer as an angel, from the back as a dragon. I have watched in alarm as Ireland has become the data centre capital of Europe, with nearly 20% of the country's electricity supply being sucked up by them. This is only possible because most people have no idea what is happening or how the 'cloud' is encroaching more and more on physical space.
Georgism sounds like a possible solution which is to tax the land and resources and consider the costs and future burdens to environment.