Hosting data centres does not give countries control of compute, a review of five places finds

Its two central findings are that governance can fail to coordinate across electricity, water, planning and public value even without regulatory capture, and that physical location alone gives no assured claim on compute access, workload priority, crisis continuity or higher-value layers.

The author proposes the CLOUDS framework as a diagnostic tool and describes capacity extraction, in which electricity, water, land, permits, institutional trust and community tolerance are turned into a single quantity called capacity and converted into compute. The framework is offered for testing, not as validated.

The article builds its argument through an integrative review and a tiered empirical design covering Chile, Australia, Querétaro, Ireland and Singapore, treating data centres as infrastructure embedded in grids, water systems, supply chains, communities and security architectures.

It introduces capacity extraction to describe how heterogeneous inputs, including electricity, water, land, permits, institutional trust and community tolerance, are rendered as one quantity called capacity and converted into compute whose higher-value layers may be controlled elsewhere.

The author concludes that policy should move toward strategic infrastructure bargaining that addresses both system capacity and the institutions that govern its conversion into compute.