Besides all the horror that comes with any war, we know that the most recent Russian invasion of Ukraine made an immense impact on energy (geo)politics. Economic historian Adam Tooze used the term 'polycrisis' to describe the sort of chain effect that comes from complex situations such as these, as well as the problems connecting environmental issues, public health emergencies and geopolitics that we have seen in recent years. I am following the current energy crisis closely due to its significance to my research object, but also due to a general interest I have in what this issue means for the political debate in terms of long-term global sustainability vs. short-term energy (and state) security.
The war also impacted the games industry in several ways, and in much more depth the data center industry. There are two cases that I could mention to exemplify this. First, the impact on the expansion cloud gaming platforms: although there are some national-based actors investing in this more residually, namely Vodafone in the UK or Magenta in Germany, most of the investments on the infrastructure are done more incisively by private transnational conglomerates (i.e.: Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Sony, Nvidia). Since the sanctions on Russia started to take effect at the beginning of the last year, we saw one of the most prominent actors in the sector, Google, publicly claiming to be "deprioritizing" gaming within their huge portfolio of services. In September there were also rumors that they were selling their cloud platform technology, Google Stadia, to another company, and the sale is really taking place at this moment. Now what is interesting to me is that in press releases Google claimed that the sale of Stadia was driven by a lack of interest from gamers. This sound very awkward, because if one follows the reports from the Games Industry (like I did) in some of the most heated markets for gaming worldwide (namely the US, Japan, Germany...), the reports say the complete opposite. They show an increasing demand for these kinds of services, and a growing acceptance of cloud platforms for gaming purposes. So I am very suspicious that the information in the press releases from Google is just an excuse (good old press release, isn't it?). Given that the cloud model requires that computer processing and storage are outsourced from the home of customers to those who manage the infrastructure, the energy costs would also be on the side of the cloud infrastructure provider. I am tending to believe that Google is giving up some of its most energy-consuming services, like Stadia, due to foreseeing an enduring conflict and growing tensions regarding energy trade, knowing that this would make their business model very risky economically. The second effect is on data center innovation and the experimental developments in cloud technology and transnational energy trades. There is an interesting case I am following closely (and which I did not include in my presentation simply due to lack of time) that refers to a data center built in Hamina, Finland. This Data Centre was built in 2014 by Yandex, a company widely known in the West as "the Russian Google". This is an interesting case because this Russian data center produces a lot of excess heat, and due to an ambitious geoengineering project, it sells the waste energy (heat) to the local Finnish company Nivos Energia Oy, which provides domestic heating services. So the excess heat produced by the data center was used to heat houses in Hamina for several years now, which eventually even led the city to declare they were meeting the goals to reach Net-Zero Emissions in 2030 one decade earlier than expected. This was an interesting case of cooperation that was directly affected by the war. As a response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the Yandex data center in Finland has been cut off from the local electricity grid in April, and started running on diesel since then. The Yandex data center changed its name and logo, but it is pretty difficult to assess how are their contracts managed since then. Since June Google (again) has bought loads of land in southeastern Finland to build its sixth data center there, in order to expand its operations in the region. So this is another sign of geopolitical "decoupling", and how it expresses in terms of the competition among tech conglomerates. Indeed, if we think these are symptoms of newly established polycrises, they might as well only be understood through epistemological perspectives which are comprehensive enough and capable of grasp, throughout different established disciplines, the multifaceted imbroglios of the present situation.
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AuthorThis blog is meant to provide a space for discussing the geophysical as well as the the imaginary entanglements between media infrastructures and organic environments. In the coming months, it will be dedicated to my current project, Cloud Gaming Atlas, which is particularly interested in observing and interrogating the infrastructures developed for cloud gaming initiatives in regard to their environmental implications. Additionally, it should also gather information about events and publications related to my project at the Zukunftskolleg and the Department of Literature, Art and Media of the University of Konstanz. Archives
January 2024
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