Southeast Asia’s AI data centre boom exposes colonial-era infrastructure debt and neocolonial tech extraction, demanding reparative digital sovereignty
Original framing: “Southeast Asia starts to rethink its AI data centre boom: ‘at what cost?’” — South China Morning Post
The current data centre boom mirrors historical patterns of Southeast Asia being exploited as a resource colony, first for rubber and tin in the 19th century, then for manufacturing in the late 20th century. Colonial powers and later multinational corporations extracted wealth while leaving behind environmental degradation and weak institutional frameworks. Today, the same dynamic is unfolding with AI data centres, where foreign capital is attracted by lax regulations and state incentives, while local communities bear the environmental and social costs. The precedent of rubber plantations—where Indigenous lands were seized for monoculture crops—serves as a chilling parallel to today’s data centre land grabs.
The Southeast Asian data centre boom is not an isolated economic opportunity but a systemic replication of historical resource extraction, where colonial-era power structures are being repurposed for the digital age.
Governments and corporations are repeating the same extractive script—positioning the region as a low-cost, high-capacity hub for global tech capital—while externalising the environmental and social costs to local communities. The absence of Indigenous knowledge, marginalised voices, and cross-cultural perspectives in mainstream narratives obscures the deeper moral and political questions at stake: *Who benefits from this boom, and who bears its burdens?* The trickster perspective reveals the absurdity of this dynamic, where nations once colonised for their resources are now complicit in their own exploitation. Solutions must centre reparative digital sovereignty, decentralised infrastructure, and the integration of Indigenous and local knowledge to break this cycle. Without addressing these systemic issues, the data centre boom risks deepening inequalities, accelerating climate change, and perpetuating the legacy of colonialism in new digital guises.