Data centres between North-South and East-West

As recently as 2014, The Hindu Business Line reported that India was unlikely to emerge as a global Data Centre hub. Citing factors such as outdated telecom policies and rolling power cuts, the newspaper noted that smaller rivals such as Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan had outperformed India in this key sector of digital economy (Charlie 2014). Five years later, an industry report by consultancy firm Broad Group (2019) indicated that India is the world's second largest growing Data Centre market in Asia, after China. According to this report, 70 per cent of India's data is still stored beyond its shores, but new data localisation legislation means that growth with proceed rapidly, particularly in cities such as Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, and Bengaluru. The significance of the Broad Group report lies less in its boosterism, which serves the Data Centre industry's search for new frontiers, than in its registration of the changing global geography of Data Centre location. One of the most important contributions of the chapters that make up this volume, which examines the past and present of Data Centres in India, is to take stock of this changing geography. Existing critical work on these facilities tends to focus on infrastructures located in the global North (see, for instance, Hogan and Vonderau 2019). By giving due attention to the conditions of emergence and operations of Data Centres in one of the world's most prominent rising markets for these infrastructures, the chapters in this book begin to ask how Data Centres contribut to the production of geographical and economic conditions that shift the axes of global power. In this way, the volume adapts the argument that 'postcolonial capitalism' is a global condition (Mitra et al. 2017) to the new modes of governance made possible by digital technologies.