Marina Otero Verzier on the Struggle for Sustainable Data Centers

Feral Clouds

In a public lecture at the Harvard Graduated School of Design (GSD) titled “Feral Clouds,” Marina Otero Verzier, lecturer in architecture at the GSD, examined the “architectures and politics of data processing and storage.” To cool servers running 24/7, data centers require vast amounts of energy and produce harmful emissions. “The cloud is not weightless,” Otero Verzier argued. “It is a vast thermo-political infrastructure reshaping the planet’s climate.” As the AI race drives investment in “hyperscale” data centers, the social and environmental impacts of computing power have come into focus and sparked resistance movements around the world.

In 2022, Otero Verzier received the Wheelwright Prize, which funded two years of research on the future of data storage. She travelled the world studying different models for data storage. In her talk, she contended with the limits of creating “greener” data centers to sustain ever-increasing demand. Instead, she challenged us to more fundamentally rethink our relationship with the data, questioning the need to preserve everything indefinitely and suggesting it may be necessary to let some of it go—a process she calls data mourning.