Scaling the Cloud: Making State and Infrastructure in Sweden

Popular representations imagine the internet as being immaterial and fluid; hidden from the public eye are the industry and complex infrastructure securing the functionality of the World Wide Web, as well as this industry's social and environmental effects. Focussing on the implementation of a Facebook data centre in the Swedish city of Luleå, this article investigates how the global cloud is localised within a specific historical and social context. It shows how this new industrial development becomes a part of state-making and regional identity-building processes by triggering the re-scaling of territories and shaping new geographies in relation to expanding cloud infrastructures. Tracing those infrastructure-making processes reveals some of the key dynamics between the Swedish state, its regions and the global IT economy.