This text is the result of a collective ethnographic study on the politicisation of the mountain landscape in western Trentino. The project is coordinated by Roberta Raffaetà (Ca’ Foscari University, Venice). Also involved in the project are Nicola Martellozzo (Ca’ Foscari University, Venice) and Andrea Vargiu (University of Sassari). The text has also benefited from discussions with Baptiste Aubert (Norbert Elias Centre, Marseille / Swiss National Science Foundation), Kyra Grieco (Paris’ School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences – EHESS), Marco Immovilli (Wageningen University, Netherlands), Owen Murphy, quantity surveyor in data centre projects (Cork, Ireland), Alessandro Rippa (University of Oslo, Norway), and Giulia Zanini (Ca’ Foscari University, Venice). Thanks also to all the people encountered in Non Valley.
This article is part of a project that has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (GA n. 949742 ERC-HealthXCross).
1For some time now, the logic governing the location of data centres has been changing. These web infrastructures constitute the necessary material counterpart of an economic model in which value production increasingly relies on collecting, storing and distributing digital data. Such an economy features a dynamic of perpetual renewal. In particular, as private and public actors in the data economy are multiplying, these new web infrastructures are adapting to changes within the technical assemblage that—on a planetary scale—enables the ‘cloud’ to function. Thus, in Europe, new data centre projects are moving away from the urban hubs that once attracted them: these new web infrastructures are now located in former industrial zones, peripheries, peri-urban areas, and—sometimes—in the mountains.
2Technical, political, strategic and regulatory factors drive the decentring of these infrastructures. However, this is not without consequences for the perception of local ecosystems, especially as there is a growing awareness of the environmental impact of data centres (see e.g., Siddik et al., 2021; Gonzalez Monserrate, 2023). As they spread throughout the Alpine region (Nova, 2023: 137-141) and other fragile ecological contexts (Johnson, 2018; Cellard and Marquet, 2023), web infrastructures bring with them new narratives, aiming to fulfil two injunctions: the ‘datafication’ (Dourish and Gómez Cruz, 2018) of our world and the conservation of ecosystems. In other words, ‘green’ and sustainability aspects increasingly play a part in debates on the material impact of data centres, often even before they are built.
- 1 The Next Generation EU recovery plan was designed by the European Commission to counter the stagnat (...)
3This article considers the multiple narratives surrounding the materiality of a data centre currently under construction in an Alpine valley. Since 2022, a public-private partnership has been preparing to create a local data centre in Non Valley (Trentino). The infrastructure will be located in the voids of the San Romedio mine (Predaia municipality). Designed by a company specialising in the development of web infrastructure, the future Intacture data centre – The Natural Home of Data – will be built, several hundred metres under the rocky massif of the Western Dolomites, by the public-private company Trentino Data Mine. So far, the project budget has amounted to over €50 million, of which €31.8 million has been provided by the project partners and approximately €18 million by the European post-pandemic recovery plan ‘Next Generation EU’1.
4The Intacture data centre is expected to become operational in 2026. While it is not yet up and running, this infrastructure already has a social existence. Insofar as it introduces technical, rational and fragmented understandings of time (Boutinet, 2012), influences social actors, and gives new meaning to local issues, the project, while not yet reality, is in some ways already operational (Boutinet, 2012). As it brings into existence that which does not yet exist, it organises, animates and conditions human action, while producing social imaginaries, disruptions and conflicts (Graan and Rommel, 2024). With regards to data centres more specifically, recent studies have resorted to ethnography and participant observation in order to question the social existence of the materiality of these infrastructures in their implementation contexts (Marquet, 2018; Crawford, 2021; Pan, 2022; Gonzalez Monserrate, 2023).
5Following in the footsteps of these approaches, this article explores the ways in which web infrastructures exist, even before their actual construction, through narratives, projects, public events, and financial practices. It aims to look more closely at the material and semantic specificities – social imaginaries, values and conflicts – produced by the localised emergence of unstable arrangements such as digital data processing technologies (Suchman, 2023). For this, it uses various qualitative data collection methods to examine the multiple conditions of social, political and historical anchoring of a data centre project in Non Valley. In particular, the research is based on an analysis of public discourse and press articles about the future data centre project. These narratives are put into perspective by prior knowledge of the region where the project is located. The author's direct participation in the few public events involving Intacture between autumn 2024 and summer 2025 has also provided useful insights, helping to clarify the positions and divergences between different social groups regarding the project. About a dozen people in the municipality of Mollaro, both residents and technicians involved in the project, were contacted during the winter/spring of 2025. Interviews were conducted to assess the participants' awareness of the project, their position (favourable or unfavourable) towards it, and the ways in which these viewpoints conveyed a particular vision of Non Valley and its future. Unfortunately, it was not possible to establish a discussion with local politicians regarding this infrastructure. Lastly, more informal exchanges, both with Trentino Data Mine operators and with valley residents, completed the data corpus of the research.
6The Non Valley data centre is not the first web infrastructure to be located underground, deep within the mountains. In the European Alps, for several years now, Switzerland has been using pre-existing cavities in the mountains, such as a bunker built during the Second World War, to install servers and data processing centres (Groen, 2024). However, Intacture promises to be the first technological ecosystem to become operational in a mine that is still in use, due to an adjusted legal framework. Indeed, through Article 5 bis of Law No. 7 of 2006, the Provincia Autonoma di Trento (Autonomous Province of Trento) has established the conditions for new forms of mining value production once the mineral reserves have been outsourced. The law allows quarry voids to be used differently from surface land. Accordingly, private actors may therefore install, in the underground spaces of mines, ‘structures intended for the storage of agricultural products or for other economic or non-economic activities’.
- 2 Personal conversation with a technician working for the Melinda consortium, 13 April 2025.
7The abundant presence of sand, shale and gravel on the Mollaro plateau (Predaia municipality) have resulted in a century of mining activity (Image 1). The extraction of black shale, which began in 1867 by a company from Lombardy, was quickly halted. It was then resumed in 1912 by the local company Mine of San Romedio (Micheli, 1982: 33-37); as the deposit was gradually depleted in the 1970s, the company turned to the production of hydraulic lime. However, this decision led to a critical financial situation, resulting in the company – which had since changed its name to Tassullo Materiali – going bankrupt in 2016. However, the region's mining past is far from a distant memory. In 2017, a group of entrepreneurs formed a joint venture to acquire Tassullo Materiali and its operating licences in order to start extracting dolomite powder to be used in the preparation of construction mortar. At the same time, initial experiments with reuse of quarry voids were conducted at the Mollaro mine, with the installation of underground cold storage warehouses for agricultural and food products. The dry environment and low temperatures of the Dolomite mines make the tunnels particularly suitable for storing fruit, cheese and wine produced by the Trentino agricultural sector: over 40,000 tonnes of apples are currently stored annually in the mine's quarry voids2.
Image 1: Map of the Mollaro village showing, in blue, the construction site of the future data centre
Image elaborated by the author from OpenStreetMap
8In addition to the large underground spaces available, technological requirements have also played a role in the choice to locate Intacture in Non Valley. Often presented as a natural and unspoilt setting, the Dolomites are in fact intersected by numerous infrastructures, which in turn create the conditions for further infrastructure projects. The Mollaro plateau is located along a major high-speed fibre optic network. From the city of Trento, these fibres extend northwards and connect numerous digital telecommunications hubs. These conditions make it particularly favourable for a data centre intended to serve as a local infrastructure for the town of Trento: high-speed telecommunications cables can reduce the latency times required to access and process data stored a few dozen kilometres away, in accordance with the model of ‘data residency’ and ‘data sovereignty’ promoted by the project's partners. Furthermore, the location of this infrastructure would also ensure sustainability, as, in addition to reducing surface land consumption, setting it up in a cool environment (12°C) would reduce the amount of energy needed to cool the servers. It is also possible that the availability of water in the region encouraged the decision to locate the project in this Alpine area, even though, at the time of writing, no estimations of the data centre's water consumption are available. The high presence of groundwater in the lower layer of dolomitic rock on the plateau (Chini, 1975) is a crucial resource for the data centre's operations. In addition, there are numerous water storage basins already in existence or under construction (1,319,000 square metres of water in total) in the valley; I was told by a valley resident (aged 60, interviewed 24 August 2024) that these are intended for the agricultural sector.
9In more general terms, the process of revitalising the Mollaro mining site, of which the data centre project is only the latest stage, is taking shape and meaning within a region that faces many challenges from a social, economic and environmental point of view. With its small towns, villages and flatlands, Non Valley is currently one of the most important regions for apple production in Europe. Since the second post-war period, this scattered, low-density valley has shifted from a highly diversified alpine agro-pastoral economy to an industrial site for apple production, particularly following the creation of the Melinda consortium by an association of 16 agricultural cooperatives in 1989; today it brings together more than 4,000 producers (Galli, 2024). The widespread distribution of apple production, combined with long-standing cooperative practices, has transformed this valley into a ‘monoculture territory’ (Galli, 2023) with severe environmental, landscape and socio-economic impacts, not to mention the considerable health problems associated with the widespread use of pesticides. This situation, which is increasingly perceived as problematic by some residents, is not only leading to rising demand for more sustainable agricultural practices such as organic farming products, but is also prompting local actors to reconsider their lifestyles in this mountainous area (Galli, 2024). Once again, this Alpine valley needs to reinvent itself to avoid becoming a marginalised and depopulated area.
10Against this worrying background, the announcement of the establishment of a data centre has provided new collective horizons and possibilities. A careful understanding of the narratives surrounding the future data centre cannot exclude residents’ concerns and aspirations about the valley and its future. During its implementation, every project generates new relationships with time, new practices and new social logics (Olivier de Sardan, 1995: 170-171). Favoured by the capillary spread of cooperative initiatives, the agricultural hyper-specialisation of this Alpine region has, over decades, built a social model closely linked to the history and landscape of the valley (Image 2). An image of success recurs in discussions about the history of villages and farms in the valley: that of peasants who have not abandoned mountains for lowlands, but – thanks to the increased availability of innovative agricultural machinery and technology – have been able to achieve good living conditions while continuing to cultivate the land they inherited. Furthermore – particularly during the harvest period – small farms in the valley, the survival of which largely depends on the supply chain structured by Melinda, are the heart of sociability and solidarity ties based on kinship and long-standing mutual acquaintance. In an area with scattered settlements, these links both contribute to collectivise the region’s success in agricultural specialisation and to make the hard-working peasant a signifier of a common identity, as I was told by a Predaia resident:
Of course, Melinda is really powerful here in the Non Valley. At the same time, Melinda's interests are intertwined with ours, as we are all peasants here. Personally, I'm not one, but many are (55-year-old shopkeeper in Mollaro, interviewed 4 February 2025).
Image 2: Entrance to the Melinda warehouse in Mollaro village, with the construction site of the data centre in the background
Credit of the author
11However, these stories of collective success are becoming less and less capable of counterbalancing the increasingly widespread perception of a difficult period for this mountain region, foretelling a bleak and uncertain future.
12In Non Valley, the loss of public services (schools, banks, post offices, birthing centres) is a frequent topic of debate, as are the increasing average age of farmers and the lack of generational renewal. Thus, while amateur historians and local scholars devote themselves to celebrating the value and poetics of a bygone peasant world, the local press condemns the globalisation that is hollowing local shops, driving young people to emigrate away, emptying villages, and thus diluting the identity of the valley and undermining its pride (Eccher, 2024).
13In this context, the announcement of the data centre project has reignited the issue of development in the valley. Far from merely being the physical support for a dematerialised economy, Intacture represents, in the eyes of many residents, an opportunity for the revival of a region that, rightly or wrongly, fears being marginalised by the most recent reconfigurations of the global economy. Described as something unique in Europe, the data centre appears to guarantee a renewed centrality for Non Valley, in accordance with a narrative that considers ‘data (...) as the raw material of the future’, as stated by the heads of Trentino Data Mine during the public presentation of the project on 1 October 2024 (Press Office of the Council of the Autonomous Province of Trento, 2024).
14However, such ‘promises of infrastructures’ (Anand et al., 2018) do not seem to have a genuine intention to address the concerns about economic desertification, agricultural decline and depopulation described above. According to its promoters, in addition to skilled local jobs – the estimated number of which remains vague – the future data centre is expected to attract international investment and create opportunities to increase the region's visibility, including tourism. Finally, it should be noted that, contrary to other studies, which have considered the establishment of data centres within the process of constructing some exploitable and pollutable ‘elsewheres’ (Hogan, 2018; Marquet, 2018), the narratives that surround this project refer instead to ideas of innovation, sustainability and interconnectedness. The future Alpine data centre appears, thus, to be ‘the mark of a region that keeps up with the times’, according to a 23-year-old woman residing in Mollaro, whom I interviewed on 11 April 2025.
15Thus, built locally as the most recent embodiment of modernity, the imagery of the data centre combines nature and technology, reinvention of the past and progress, localism and globalisation. Discourses that promote this web infrastructure, insofar as they refer to the neoliberal logic of ‘movement for movement's sake’ (Le Meur, 2020, p. 10), hinder any possibility of imagining alternative trajectories for territorial development. Thus, the same promises of modernity that accompany the data centre tend to reduce any criticism of the project to the scarecrow of a ‘step backward’.
16Although the socio-economic and cultural context of Non Valley may seem suitable for the promises of this infrastructure, the advent of the project has sparked mixed reactions from those affected by the establishment of the future data centre. Within a few months of its announcement (summer 2023), the project revealed its strong prescriptive power by creating a divide within the valley's population, particularly among residents of the villages affected. Consequently, while the data centre is being promoted by a partnership of universities, foundations and companies in the data sector, largely located outside Non Valley, differences in attitudes towards the project are particularly evident at ground level.
17Although the local press announced the project in November 2022, the first presentation about the future data centre, supported by the municipal administration of Predaia, took place in March 2023, at a time when the Trentino Data Mine joint venture had not yet been formally established.
18In the absence of spokespeople directly involved in the project, communication about the project from the municipality representatives appeared weak. As a result, some residents started to assume – as I was told by a Mollaro resident on 19 March 2025 – that the non-exhaustiveness of this meeting was ‘deliberately’ designed to conceal the real environmental impact of the project in terms of electromagnetic pollution, noise, and water consumption.
19Since then, several conflicts have arisen over the construction of the future data centre, pitting local decision-makers against a significant part of the valley's population. From an analytical perspective, these conflicts have taken different forms that can be presented and classified based on the level of opposition to the project.
- 3 In the Italian Alps, as in many mountain areas, there are numerous examples of land owned and manag (...)
20According to the project communications, it is planned that the surface buildings of the future data centre will be built on land subject to collective usage rights3, which has caused reaction from some residents of the hamlets affected by the project.
21In particular, in the absence of a collective body responsible for administering these land plots (Separate Administration for Goods of Collective use – A.S.U.C. – which, according to Italian law n° 168/2017, defines the ‘norms for collective domains’4), it was the municipal council’s decision to sell Trentino Data Mine the cultivated and wooded plots (approximately 17,000 m² of woodland in total), which belonged to the inhabitants of two hamlets affected by the project. The residents resisted the project by trying to impede the sale. Approximately 50 residents began the administrative process of forming a Separate Administration for Goods of Collective Use (A.S.U.C.) in order to lodge an appeal against the land transfer. On several occasions, this group of residents stressed that they were not opposing the project itself, but rather the way in which it was being undertaken. In particular, they highlighted the lack of consultation on the part of the administration, the low sale price – especially in relation to the significant investments planned for the data centre – and, last but not least, the sentimental value that the land, which their ancestors had worked so hard to acquire, held for them5. Although rejected, the appeal nevertheless proved effective; in May 2024, Trentino Data Mine decided to abandon the purchase of the collective land and to move the data centre's surface buildings onto private plots.
22Criticism of the project has extended to other sections of the local population due to fears that the data centre could lead to the hoarding of available water in Non Valley, reawakening anxieties that have been long-standing in Trentino (Leonardi, 2014). Such fears were the starting point for the information and protest actions led by a Trentino techno-critical collective, which has been long engaged in a reflection – fuelled by numerous contributions from international peasant movements – on the harmful effects of the ‘datafication’ of the world, particularly the Alpine agricultural world6:
23‘In the more arid areas of this [US region], when it came to large data centres, it was decided that during periods of drought, water would be taken from farmers to supply the data centres. Because they must always remain operational. They cannot be switched off ’ (speech during the public evening event on 8 October 2024).
24During autumn 2024 and winter 2025, two public meetings were held in Non Valley to discuss the techno-dependent and hyper-computerised model of society embodied by the data centre. Local authorities attempted all possible means to prevent these meetings from taking place, considering them to be ‘contrary to the administration's position and commitment on this subject’ (e-mail dated 4 February 2025).
25Despite attempts to silence the debate, both meetings attracted significant attendance from the local population. At least for now, the participation in these debates, mostly driven by a desire to understand better the impact of the planned infrastructure, does not seem to have sparked more radical opposition to the Alpine data centre project. While broadly aware of the serious environmental consequences of these infrastructures, most of my interlocutors in Non Valley believed that, since ‘everyone has a smartphone in their pocket’ (comment made during the public event on 6 February 2024), opposing a data centre located ‘on your doorstep’ would be both extremist and contradictory.
26While literature on data centre implementation has often focused on critically examining the supposed immateriality of these infrastructures – as suggested by the metaphor of the ‘cloud’ – the data centre in Non Valley marks a shift in respect to this. The narratives surrounding this infrastructure make the material and environmental dimensions of the Alpine region the first argument in favour of the project: moreover, in respect to the materiality of the data centre, the social worlds of ‘sustainable development’ appear to be capable of renewing themselves by incorporating the very criticisms previously levelled at them (on this, see Li, 2007: 276-277).
27However, the construction of the data centre as a key element in the ‘green’ digital transition is not just a matter of communication, as it involves putting mountain environments ‘to work’. Due to its singularity, this process deserves to be examined in depth.
28Focusing on the idea that the data centre represents ‘The Natural Home of Data’, the developers' official communications emphasise the economic and ecological value provided ‘naturally’ by the Mollaro mountain, ‘materially’ justifying the choice of implanting the data centre in Non Valley, while at the same time reducing land and resource consumption. However, the availability of a suitable environment to host web infrastructure is far from a matter of course.
29As emphasised by environmental anthropology, even ‘natural’ resources are the product of social, historical and economic processes – forms of spatial engineering (Tsing et al., 2024: 35, 36-38) – which convert the materiality of a landscape into resources that become available and can be exploited (Howard, 2018; Ingold, 2018). Indeed, as we have seen, it is only due to technological innovation and to an adjusted legal framework that the material ecologies of this mountainous area can be exploited.
30Constructed as a ‘resource’, the mountains of Non Valley do not lose their ‘natural’ appearance. On the contrary, it is this very nature that is mobilised by new processes of value production. At a time of growing awareness of the global ecological crisis in which we all live, the ‘naturalness’ of the data centre is itself translated into capitalist value, as it becomes a factor in attracting investment, particularly from those actors in the data economy professing to be involved in an ecological transition process, according to a Trentino Data Mine manager on 17 April 2025. As it is both the manifestation and the material substrate of a highly financialised economy, the data centre in Mollaro thus inscribes the Alps’ material ecology within global capitalism. Driven by increasingly global financial markets, the ‘naturalised’ dimension of the mountains is per se a source of value, as – even in the absence of human labour – it turns biological and ecological processes into direct sources of wealth (Leonardi, 2021: 23).
31By describing the discourse, conflicts and visions surrounding the establishment of a data centre in the Alpine context of Non Valley, this article has examined the social processes generated when actors in the data economy develop an interest in mountain areas and their resources. As a result, a few lessons can be drawn from the study of this case. Alpine environments have historically provided environmental resources to other areas, as evidenced by the mining activities at San Romedio themselves. However, it seems that the recent transformations in the cognitive economy have changed the nature and circulation of these resources, as well as the modes in which value is produced.
32Driven by both geopolitical and normative reasons, the growing demand for ‘nearby’ web infrastructure has largely contributed to the decision to locate the data centre in Non Valley, due also to an ad hoc legal framework that allows quarry voids to be used for non-extractive economic activities. A new form of technological, economic and legal engineering of the Trentino mountains is thus becoming the basis for an infrastructure economy in which value creation heavily relies on the leasing of data storage space to public and private actors, who may potentially be located far away from this Alpine area. The material ecology of Non Valley is thus encapsulated within large-scale financial processes. It follows that the territoriality of the data centre will not correspond to the territoriality of the forms of value produced by this infrastructure, to the extent that the value can only return to this Alpine region through the creation of a handful of on-site jobs, which are generally very limited when it comes to automated infrastructure.
33Secondly, the ethnographic approach adopted to account for the modalities of existence of a future data centre has allowed us to examine how, following the announcement of the project, the local population is coping with a web infrastructure. There have, of course, been a few conflicts. However, it should be noted that these have only involved a fraction of the local population, who are largely more concerned with the way the project is being implemented than with the ‘social project’ underlying this infrastructure. Moreover, an analysis of the local anchoring of discourse in favour of this infrastructure has highlighted how the announcement of the project resonates with various aspirations and anxieties that currently permeate Non Valley. In a region confronted with multiple ‘crises’ and the fear of being geographically and economically marginalised, this infrastructure embodies the possibility of a bright future for an area that, although mountainous, aims to stay rooted in the modern world. The new forms of mountain infrastructure thus seem to be reproposing the old promises of modernity that social sciences literature believed to have been critically dismantled decades ago (Kothari et al., 2019). In fact, while the populations of the Italian mountains seem to be torn between nostalgia for ‘the good old days’ and the wish to embrace modernity (Orlandi, 2024), ethnographic explorations of the imaginaries and discourses surrounding the installation of a web infrastructure in an Alpine valley shows how timely this criticism continues to be.