A Walk around Google and Microsoft’s Hyperscale Data Centre in the Wieringermeerpolder

Data centres are a crucial part of our internet infrastructure, and yet they remain black boxes in the landscape and highly invisible structures we don’t think about often enough. But how do these data centres impact the places in which they are built and the communities that live there? And what impact are data centres already having on the global environment? Data centres use huge amounts of power and water resources, although they are only required to publish these usage numbers starting from 2024 in the EU. What resources are necessary for our online infrastructures, and who gets to decide how they are implemented?

During this very special field trip we will take a tourbus from Amsterdam to the industrial park Agriport in the Wieringermeerpolder, which houses Google’s and Microsoft’s hyperscale data centres. During our hike around these huge constructions, we will take a look at how they came into existence, their infrastructure, and contemplate our relationship with data centres and what possible alternatives we could imagine taking place in these landscapes.

We are proud to introduce  Marloes de Valk, a software artist, writer, and PhD researcher, who co-organised this event with us. She has been following the development of the data centres in the Wieringermeerpolder for a long time.