Geopolitical ecologies of cloud capitalism: Territorial restructuring and the making of national computing power in the U.S. and China
Name
kollar-stokols-2025-geopolitical-ecologies-of-cloud-capitalism-territorial-restructuring-and-the-making-of-national.pdf
Size
1.58 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
3fbc9e9466b9de29b7a10107433b8576
Author(s)
Kollar, Justin
Stokols, Andrew
Date Issued
September 15, 2025
Journal
Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space
Publisher
SAGE Publications
Citation
Kollar, J., & Stokols, A. (2026). Geopolitical ecologies of cloud capitalism: Territorial restructuring and the making of national computing power in the U.S. and China. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 58(1), 38-58.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
As computing power becomes central to geopolitical rivalry, cloud infrastructure is increasingly framed as critical to national security, economic resilience and technological sovereignty. Current debates often focus on global competition – especially between the U.S. and China – highlighting strategic investments, export controls and infrastructure diplomacy abroad. Yet far less attention has been paid to the domestic territorial transformations that make such geopolitical projection possible. This paper argues that national strategies for AI and cloud dominance depend on the reorganization of land, energy and regulatory systems to sustain large-scale computation. Using a geopolitical ecology framework, we examine how the U.S. and China build national computing power as a strategic economic and military resource. In the U.S., cloud firms operate as state-aligned actors, drawing on fragmented regulatory authority, public subsidies and national security discourse to expand into rural and peri-urban regions. China pursues a more centralized strategy through its East Data, West Computing initiative, redistributing infrastructure to inland provinces under state-led development goals. Through comparative regional analysis, we show how domestic infrastructural expansion underpins geopolitical rivalry, producing new forms of territorial governance and socio-environmental inequality. Far from immaterial, the cloud is grounded in enclosure, extraction and the spatial foundations of techno-industrial power.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Urban Studies and Planning
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X251369704
