About

We’ve built one of the most energy and resource-intensive industries in human history, and we’ve successfully made it invisible. The “cloud” is a masterpiece of abstraction: a metaphor so effective it has decoupled the decisions we make about data from the physical consequences of making them.

This session takes a systems lens to that abstraction, exploring how the design of digital infrastructure has inherited the same linear, extract-and-forget logic that has defined industrial economies for two centuries, why the arrival of AI is accelerating that trajectory faster than most sustainability frameworks can track, and what it would actually mean to account for the true cost of compute. Not to slow down innovation, but to design it more honestly.

1. Why “the cloud” is one of the most consequential acts of rebranding in modern industrial history, and what it cost us to buy into it
2. The physical infrastructure behind every AI model, every data pipeline, every dashboard: water, land, energy, rare earth materials, and why it rarely appears in any organisation’s sustainability accounting
3. How the linear logic baked into data infrastructure mirrors the design failures of physical supply chains, and what circular economy thinking could actually offer as an alternative
4. The gap between corporate net-zero commitments and the exploding Scope 3 emissions footprint of AI adoption, and who is currently accountable for closing it
5. What “responsible data infrastructure” looks like in practice, and the questions every data leader in this room should be asking of their providers, their architects, and themselves