Media / Publication
February 28, 2025

State, platform capitalism and infrastructural power: Microsoft's data centres in Greece 2.0

In recent years, data centres have become critical infrastructures, supporting cloud computing, AI and digital services. While the EU champions ‘digital sovereignty,’ foreign tech giants like Microsoft are tightening their grip over key digital infrastructures across the continent. Who benefits from these investments, who bears the costs and what are their broader implications?

A new article by AlgoSoc postdoctoral researcher Charis Papaevangelou (University of Amsterdam) and Eugenia Siapera (University College Dublin) examines how the Greek state has actively enabled Microsoft’s large-scale data centre investment. Framed as part of Greece’s post-COVID recovery plan, this investment is presented as a step toward digital modernisation. The two researchers show how Microsoft’s how foreign tech firms are embedding themselves in national infrastructures, while states justify these dependencies through techno-colonial discourses of modernisation and growth.

The study raises several critical issues, including regulatory favouritism for Big Tech, the disregard for the environmental costs of these energy-hungry infrastructures and the contradiction of national interests with the EU’s digital sovereignty agenda. Especially as regards the latter, while EU policymakers push for autonomy from US tech giants, semi-peripheral member states like Greece or Ireland actively deepen their reliance on these firms to access the global value chains and capital flows of platform capitalism. With geopolitical tensions rising and questions over EU-US digital relations looming with Trump 2.0, the growing entanglement between platform corporations and national governments, especially concerning critical infrastructures, demands urgent scrutiny.

The article is published in the peer-reviewed journal Platforms & Society and is available as Open Acces to read here.