AI, Infrastructures and Sustainability

AI infrastructures are rapidly expanding. This event explores the social and environmental impacts of surging data centres. Who benefits from the AI hype and who bears the costs? How do metaphors used to describe technology restrict our understanding of these questions?

Join us for the book launch ‘AI, Infrastructures and Sustainability’, an event that questions the material, political, and environmental realities behind today’s AI systems. The book explores critical issues, such as the environmental degradation, economic concentration, and social justice of AI infrastructure, areas that have often been overlooked in discussion on sustainability. The environmental impacts of data centres, the factories of AI, have been extensively documented. Despite this, the European Commission aims to triple the number of data centres operating within the EU, relying primarily on efficiency–based measures to control environmental harm. This “sustainability through optimization” approach is flawed and does not account for AI’s supply chain of violence. It begs the question why we are deepening conflicts across the globe in order to build places where machines thrive?
During this event, editors Anne Mollen and Fieke Jansen, will introduce the ideas and motivations behind ‘AI, Infrastructure, and sustainability’, reflecting on what the material nature, political economy, and governance of AI reveal about its broader societal consequences. Contributing authors Anne Mollen, Patrick Brodie, and Gerwin van Schie will further explore the power structures, environmental impact, and knowledge implications of AI infrastructures.

Speakers

Anne Mollen is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Communication Studies at theUniversity of Münster. She conducts research on automation, algorithms and “ArtificialIntelligence“, specifically on the sustainability of AI, automation and public opinionformation, and the use of automated decision–making systems in the workplace. Patrick Brodie is an Assistant Professor and Ad Astra Fellow in the School of Informationand Communication Studies at University College Dublin. His research focuses on thepolitical ecology of digital infrastructures. He is the co–author of From the Bog to the Cloud:Dependency and Eco–Modernity in Ireland (Bristol UP, 2025).

Gerwin van Schie works as an Assistant Professor in the Media and Culture Department at Utrecht University, where he investigates how plant, soil, flower, and tree metaphors are operationalised in various forms of algorithmic culture, ranging from government data systems to academic discourse on platform infrastructures.

Fieke Jansen is Assistant Professor at the Media Study department of the University of Amsterdam. She is the co-PI of the critical infrastructure lab en her research focussed on how the material impact of expanding infrastructures is shaping the management, distribution, and depletion of natural resources.