Clouds of power and the politics of data

At the time of writing there are 4,913 colocation data centres in 130 countries around the world, if we are to take the figures from the Colocation Data Centers site as an approximation. The United States commands 1,831 of these, the United Kingdom has 268 and Germany is host to 233. Australia has 129, India 162 while Hong Kong, Indonesia, and Taiwan hold 59, 53 and 10 respectively. China has 87, Russia 59, Ireland 27 with Luxembourg hosting 15, the Czech Republic 24, Malaysia 32, South Africa 26, Pakistan has 19 and Turkey 65. The Netherlands has 199 and Ukraine 34. This represents a 30 – 50 per cent growth in the sector over the past 5 to 7 years. With their capacity for supporting ‘peering arrangements’ that enable faster exchanges of data, colocation data centres are primarily geared towards finance capital. However, there is no obvious reason why finance capital should hold a monopoly of interest in colocation data centres given the types of service offered at many of these centres. These services include dedicated servers, virtual servers, cages, rack cabinets, man- aged hosting and so forth – none of which are exclusive to high-frequency trading and the competitive advantage obtained with optimized low latency (fast connections), but are features also of data economies more generally. This essay surveys some of the primary political issues that attend the burgeoning data economies and the arguably short-term business horizon of data centres.