Understanding and resisting Data centers: Lessons from Spain

Data centres are multiplying across the globe and increasingly, they are reshaping rural and semi-rural landscapes far from the cities whose data they process. Behind the promise of jobs and digital progress lie enormous demands on electricity grids, water supplies, and land, often decided far from the communities that will live with the consequences. Aotearoa New Zealand is no exception: proposals for new data centres and the energy infrastructure to power them are raising similar questions here about who benefits, who decides, and who bears the environmental cost,  questions that echo longstanding debates over land, water, and indigenous sovereignty.

To think through these questions, this talk turns to one of the most intense sites of this global infrastructural expansion: the Basque Country, where more than 80 energy and data centre mega-projects have been proposed for the province of Araba (Álava), a region historically defined by extensive public and communal ownership of land. Drawing on two years of fieldwork — combining participatory action research within land-defence collectives, in-depth interviews, and observation of everyday communal governance,  I explore how this capitalist infrastructural boom is being built, contested, and reimagined. I develop a distinction between what I call infrastructures of capital and infrastructures for emancipation, showing how the same physical and institutional terrain can become either a vehicle for extraction or a foundation for collective resistance. In a moment when "critical infrastructure" is invoked to justify everything from data centres to energy megaprojects, this talk asks: infrastructure for whom, and towards what kind of future? What Araba's struggles reveal about the machinery of extraction, and the forms of resistance it provokes, offers a lens for thinking through the choices New Zealand faces as its own data centre boom unfolds.

Biography

Aitor Jiménez is a sociologist, lawyer, and activist. He is the author of The Crimes of Digital Capitalism (NYU Press, 2025), a book that examines the criminal practices of Big Tech. He is currently a Senior Researcher at the Faculty of Law of the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). He is an activist-scholar who studies and works alongside social movements resisting the socio-environmental conse- quences of digital technologies and the expansion of digital infrastructures. He is engaged in prison and police abolitionism, exploring alternatives to punitive systems and advocating for transformative approaches to justice

Hosted by Dr. Mahdis Azarmandi, School of Social and Cultural Studies in Education, Te Kura Mātai Ahurea Ako. In collaboration with Mātai Tōrangapū, Hononga Tāwāhi Department Political Science and International Relation