Palgrave volume ties AI sustainability to mines, grids, clouds

A new Palgrave Macmillan collection argues that appraising AI's sustainability means following the technology from mineral mines through national energy grids to the data-center commodity itself, not measuring model efficiency in isolation. AI Infrastructures and Sustainability: Expanding Perspectives on Automation, Communication and Media, edited by Anne Mollen, Fieke Jansen, Sigrid Kannengießer and Julia Velkova, was published open access in March 2026 in the Palgrave Studies in European Communication Research and Education series. Kannengießer and Mollen are both at the University of Münster's Center of Interdisciplinary Sustainability Research. Two experts in our Who's Who directory have shared the book.

The editors define AI infrastructures as "material-discursive arrangements that enable the automated transformation of information from individual data points to agglomerated outputs through probability assessments and large-scale data processing." The book, they write, sets out to address "environmental impacts, economic concentration, and social justice," areas the volume argues have not been comprehensively examined under the sustainability label in AI debates.

Sixteen chapters sit across three parts. The first traces material substrates: Ana Valdivia's "Follow the Thing: AI," a chapter on Amazonian mining by de Castro Leal, Krüger and Kannengießer, Iago Bojczuk on Fortaleza as a Brazilian cloud hub, and Julia Velkova on aligning Swedish energy grids with cloud demand. Later parts turn to discourse and governance, taking in Olga Dovbysh on Yandex's sustainability reporting, Dan McQuillan on "total mobilisation and decomputing," and Fieke Jansen and Niels ten Oever asking, in a chapter title, whether a burning planet can afford "more compute."