<scp>GOVERNING THE CLOUD</scp> : Infrastructural Statecraft and the Political Ecology of Digital Expansion in Oregon

Abstract Oregon's wave of data center and semiconductor projects shows how cloud capitalism reorganizes resource systems and territorial governance. Examining Amazon, Google, and Intel, the article traces how fiscal incentives, utility programs, and land‐use instruments are recalibrated to secure hyperscale loads. Through a political‐ecological lens, it shows governance shifting from public deliberation to contractual and executive venues, including PPAs, special‐service tariffs, confidentiality agreements, and expedited siting, facilitating rapid buildout while externalizing socio‐ecological costs to municipalities and ecosystems. Case studies in The Dalles, Morrow/Umatilla, and Hillsboro demonstrate how ‘systems‐integration’ by state and utility actors couples energy, water, and land as a single infrastructure, narrows transparency and contestation, and locks local institutions into long‐duration commitments. These arrangements privatize control and returns while socializing risk and ecological harm, producing durable dependencies with diminishing local benefit. The article advances urban political ecology and infrastructure studies by theorizing a digital metabolic regime and by specifying infrastructural dependency as an engineered modality of power. The study concludes that governing digital expansion requires reintegrating energy–water–land assessment, restoring disclosure and public standing in decision venues, and tying incentives to verifiable performance and community benefit.