Description
This paper examines the planetary political ecology of digital militarisation, focusing on how big tech companies and their AI technologies have become integral to imperial warfare. Situating Project Nimbus—the $1.2 billion cloud partnership between Google, Amazon Web Services, and the Israeli state—as a central case study, we argue that these infrastructures are ecological actors within a broader system of militarised accumulation. Through data centres built on occupied Palestinian land, big tech’s cloud infrastructures both depend upon and reproduce colonial environmental warfare—extracting water and energy from stolen resources while contributing to what has been widely characterised as an “ecocide” in Gaza. These dynamics exemplify how big tech operates as an armoured appendage of US imperialism, binding the digital economy to planetary systems of militarised control.
Extending the concept of “geopolitical ecology,” we map the material and infrastructural assemblages that undergird AI’s industrialisation within the “twin transition” of digitalisation and decarbonisation. We show how US big tech monopolies are reorganising ecologies toward geopolitical and geo-economic competition under the guise of sustainability and security. As the ecological “beforemaths” of AI production converge with its militarised applications, from Israel to Europe, warfare is increasingly waged through infrastructures of computation and extraction. Ultimately, we argue that the political ecology of AI reveals a reorganisation of planetary life around militarised accumulation, where Gaza stands as a harbinger of future imperial landscapes. Understanding and resisting these formations is an existential imperative for political ecology and technology studies alike.
