Data centres and the new strategic infrastructure governance: From cloud ESG to compute sovereignty

Data centres have moved from the background of the digital economy to the foreground of energy, climate, industrial and national-security politics. Artificial intelligence is intensifying this shift through growing demand for compute, electricity, cooling, land, hardware and critical materials. Yet governance remains largely organised around facility-level metrics that treat data centres as bounded technical assets rather than strategic infrastructure embedded in grids, water systems, supply chains, communities and security architectures. This article develops the CLOUDS framework—Coherence, Lifecycle materiality, Operational locality, Utility burden, Digital sovereignty, and Social licence and public purpose—as a diagnostic architecture for evaluating data centres as system-shaping infrastructure. It also develops capacity extraction: the process through which heterogeneous inputs such as electricity, water, land, permits, institutional trust and community tolerance are rendered as a single quantity called capacity and converted into compute whose higher-value layers may remain controlled elsewhere. The framework is developed through an integrative review and tiered empirical design spanning Chile, Australia, Querétaro, Ireland and Singapore. It is proposed for testing rather than presented as validated. Two findings are central. First, instrument incoherence can arise without regulatory capture when no institution can govern trade-offs across electricity, water, planning and public value. Second, hosting is not sovereignty: physical location alone creates no assured claim on compute access, workload priority, crisis continuity or higher-value layers. The policy implication is strategic infrastructure bargaining over both system capacity and the institutions governing its conversion into compute.