The Former Ericsson Data Centre in Vaudreuil-Dorion, QC

Patrick Brodie

Somewhere nearby, there is a spectacular building tucked away in a suburban industrial park. Surrounded by logistics centers, warehouses, and office blocks, and situated conspicuously close to an energy substation, this building stands out against the otherwise drab landscape. Despite its ostentatious design and visibility against the landscape, multiple layers of security separate visitors from the carpark of this building, and cameras point from the building and its perimeter fence in all directions. If you ring the security buzzer, a gruff voice answers and asks for identification. You are most likely denied entry, if not threatened off the premises. 

The above description could describe any number of hyperscale data center campuses in the logistical hinterlands surrounding contemporary cities. The building that inspired the above description is a former Ericsson data center in Vaudreuil-Dorion, just outside of Montreal. Encased by a semi-transparent mesh-like exterior, only partially masking an aborted Canadian expansion for the Swedish telecommunications giant, the building sits vacant, now owned by US real estate firm GI Partners and administered by Montreal firm BGIS. After local political mobilization, government tax breaks, and promises of local jobs and prosperity, the empty site now employs a skeleton crew of security and maintenance professionals tasked with not letting the admittedly impressive structure fall to ruin while waiting for new buyers. The mechanical connections in the building wait to be fired up by a new influx of tech capital and machinery.  

This site visit and field description is part of an ongoing project I am doing with Dr. Julia Velkova (Linköping University) focusing on this digital ruin and its surrounding politics and circulations. Such simultaneously drab and spectacular structures as data centers, built and un-built, occupied or vacant, represent the parked and foreclosed local aspirations of infrastructure as much as speculative drives of global tech capital. Studies of media infrastructure tend to focus on technologies and practices in the present, looking on to the future. But how does one keep track of a continually mutating set of conditions in order to draw productive and generative conceptual conclusions? How does local culture and material conditions respond to the arcane movements of transnational capital? And how can we study what is left behind when it leaves, or never arrives?

Text and image by Patrick Brodie