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In this chapter, we examine how major digital AI and cloud infrastructure companies concoct promissory stories about environmental sustainability in their corporate blogs, which we approach as aspirational and performative corporate environmental communication. Our empirical data consists of corporate blog entries published between 2000 and 2024 by five major global data infrastructure companies: Amazon, Apple, Google, IBM, and Microsoft. We used dictionary-based filtering combined with manual coding to identify posts that concern environmental sustainability (n = 497). Using corpus linguistics assisted discourse analysis, we explore what kinds of future-oriented promissory stories the AI and cloud infrastructure industry tells in relation to environmental sustainability in their corporate communication. Our findings highlight how the companies discursively reinforce the relationship between digital and green by framing digital technologies and AI as indispensable tools in the transition towards sustainable societies. By doing this, they strategically amalgamate sustainability issues to construct expanding legitimacy for their infrastructural power and simultaneously hide the increasing concerns over the growing environmental impact of digitalization.

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Narratives of Indispensability and Infrastructural Solutionism of AI Companies

  • 章节

  • 出版模式：

    开放获取

  • 发表日期：

    2026年

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  • Salla-Maaria Laaksonen,
  • Meri Frig

摘要

In this chapter, we examine how major digital AI and cloud infrastructure companies concoct promissory stories about environmental sustainability in their corporate blogs, which we approach as aspirational and performative corporate environmental communication. Our empirical data consists of corporate blog entries published between 2000 and 2024 by five major global data infrastructure companies: Amazon, Apple, Google, IBM, and Microsoft. We used dictionary-based filtering combined with manual coding to identify posts that concern environmental sustainability (n = 497). Using corpus linguistics assisted discourse analysis, we explore what kinds of future-oriented promissory stories the AI and cloud infrastructure industry tells in relation to environmental sustainability in their corporate communication. Our findings highlight how the companies discursively reinforce the relationship between digital and green by framing digital technologies and AI as indispensable tools in the transition towards sustainable societies. By doing this, they strategically amalgamate sustainability issues to construct expanding legitimacy for their infrastructural power and simultaneously hide the increasing concerns over the growing environmental impact of digitalization.