Who Traps Whom? Microsoft's Data Centres in the Rheinisches Revier (Estrid Sorensen)

• Tuesday, November 17^th / 2–4 pm / C40.530

• This event is in English. 

• This event is in-person with a hybrid option. Contact us to receive the Teams Meeting link.
• Registration is not necessary. 

Data centres are mushrooming everywhere, and so are protests against them. The large hyperscale data centres in which US tech companies run their AI and other processes are viewed with particular scepticism in Europe. These companies are seen as invading our continent; some even speak of neo-colonialism. Corsín Jiménez (2018) thinks of infrastructures as traps whose design anticipates and shapes agency. What kinds of traps are US data centres in Europe? How are they designed, and what do they trap? While there are good reasons to be sceptical about foreign investment in data centres (cf. Bresnihan & Brodie 2025), a closer look at how US tech companies come to design these technical installations in the first place paints a more complex picture.  

The talk takes us to the Rheinisches Revier and attends to hyperscale expansion in the area. In July 2026, Microsoft announced that it had secured the fourth and final site in the Rheinisches Revier for a set of hyperscale data centres to be completed by 2030. Reconstructing the negotiations and decisions behind the Microsoft facilities reveals a complicated network of exchanges between industry, politics and local citizens. It raises the question of who traps whom. 

Estrid Sørensen did her doctoral studies in Copenhagen and Lancaster and taught sociology of technology and anthropology of knowledge and technology at Aarhus University, at the Technical University Berlin, Humboldt University Berlin and since 2010 at Ruhr University Bochum, where she is full professor of anthropology of knowledge. Founded in Science & Technology Studies she has done ethnographic – and sometimes speculative – research on the materiality of educational practices, on infrastructures of video game harm, on digital methods and on data infrastructures, particularly scientific data centres. She has co-founded Danish and German STS associations and was the secretary of EASST. Since 2019 she is the head of the RUSTlab – the Ruhr University Science & Technology Studies Lab. 

Further information: https://www.sowi.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/cupak/index.html.en  
https://rustlab.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/ 

An event organised in collaboration with the Centre for Digital Culture and the research area Climate Futures in Digital Cultures

cdcforum@leuphana.com