The environmental impact of data centers, intensified by generative AI, has created a tension between short-term profit and climate change’s long-term threats, which cloud service providers like Microsoft seek to reconcile through corporate sustainability projects. In this chapter, I critically examine three sustainability projects undertaken with Microsoft Azure to understand how the company’s imaginary of sustainability shapes cloud infrastructure and what political possibilities result. In Microsoft’s own data center sustainability efforts, discourses of investment, efficiency, and circularity seek to decouple environmental impact and business growth. Cloud for Sustainability tools commoditize sustainability via streamlined data analytics and visions of a datafied natural sublime, becoming the infrastructure of sustainability for companies across industries. The Planetary Computer, by hosting data and applications for free, focalizes environmental knowledge and decision-making at an abstracted planetary scale. These neoliberal logics actively foreclose other possible arrangements of computation and environment. I argue that they represent more than greenwashing; the company’s fantasy that technology, and especially AI, can reconcile capitalism with environmentalism reflects infrastructural power that depoliticizes the present in favor of a “sustainable future.” This reflects a “cruel optimism” that through technological progress, sustainable cloud infrastructure can reconcile perpetual growth with present and future flourishing.

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The Cruel Optimism of the Sustainable Cloud: Fantasies and Futures of Microsoft Azure

  • Hamsini Sridharan

摘要

The environmental impact of data centers, intensified by generative AI, has created a tension between short-term profit and climate change’s long-term threats, which cloud service providers like Microsoft seek to reconcile through corporate sustainability projects. In this chapter, I critically examine three sustainability projects undertaken with Microsoft Azure to understand how the company’s imaginary of sustainability shapes cloud infrastructure and what political possibilities result. In Microsoft’s own data center sustainability efforts, discourses of investment, efficiency, and circularity seek to decouple environmental impact and business growth. Cloud for Sustainability tools commoditize sustainability via streamlined data analytics and visions of a datafied natural sublime, becoming the infrastructure of sustainability for companies across industries. The Planetary Computer, by hosting data and applications for free, focalizes environmental knowledge and decision-making at an abstracted planetary scale. These neoliberal logics actively foreclose other possible arrangements of computation and environment. I argue that they represent more than greenwashing; the company’s fantasy that technology, and especially AI, can reconcile capitalism with environmentalism reflects infrastructural power that depoliticizes the present in favor of a “sustainable future.” This reflects a “cruel optimism” that through technological progress, sustainable cloud infrastructure can reconcile perpetual growth with present and future flourishing.