AI Infrastructures and Sustainability

Anne Mollen is a postdoc researcher at the University of Münster. Her research focuses on justice in the context of automation, digital media and data-centric technologies, specifically social and environmental justice. She has been a member of the Sustainable AI working group of the German Committee for Sustainability Research.Fieke Jansen is a postdoc researcher and co-principal investigator with the critical infrastructure lab at the University of Amsterdam. Her research interest is to understand how the material impact of expanding infrastructures is shaping the management, distribution, and depletion of natural resources. Fieke did her PhD at the data justice lab of Cardiff University.Sigrid Kannengießer is Professor of Communication Science with a focus on Media Sociology at the University of Münster, Germany. Her research interests include digital technologies, AI infrastructures and sustainability; critical data practices; energy communication; social movements; and gender media studies.Julia Velkova is Professor of Media and Culture at Linköping University. Her research explores the relations between digital infrastructures and energy, and the temporalities of media infrastructure. She is the co-editor of Media Backends: Digital Infrastructures and Sociotechnical Relations (2023).

• Chapter 1 : Introduction : De-Centring Artificial Intelligence and Rethinking Sustainability.- PART I : Elements, Materials, Resources.- Chapter 2 :Amazonia's Place in AI : Minerals and Mining as the Cradle of Infrastructuring.- Chapter 3 :Growing the Cloud at the “Corner of the Atlantic” : Fortaleza as a Digital Infrastructure Hub Amidst AI-Renewable Energy Paradigms in Brazil.- Chapter 4 : Aligning Energy Grids, Clouds and Public Values in Sweden.- Chapter 5 : Aquaculture, AI, and the Planetary Domestication.- PART II : Promises, Economies, Discourses.- Chapter 6 : The Cruel Optimism of the Sustainable Cloud : Fantasies and Futures of Microsoft Azure.- Chapter 7 : Narratives of Indispensability and Infrastructural Solutionism by AI Giants.- Chapter 8 : Alliance or Self-Reliance in New Geopolitical Technospheres – AI Infrastructures in Poland .- Chapter 9 : Discursive Infrastructuring of AI in Russia : Yandex’s Sustainability Reporting.- Chapter 10 : Entangled Sustainabilities : News Media Partnerships and Generative AI Market Power.- PART III Futures, Politics, Governance.- Chapter 11 : Not Seeing the Data for the Trees: How Ecological Metaphors Matter in Academic Discourse on Platforms and AI.- Chapter 12 : Responsiveness and AI in Environmental Governance : Infrastructures, Power, and Institutional Ca-pacity.- Chapter 13 : AI Infrastructures, Total Mobilisation and Decomputing.-Chapter 14 : More Compute for a Burning Planet? A Scarcity Approach to AI Infrastructures.- Chapter 15 : The Good Infrastructure: Digital Futures, Values and Friction.