Apologies for cross-posting. Dear All, We invite you to participate in our special session on Hyperscaler Geographies at the 4th Digital Geographies Conference 2025 – Artificial Geographies: Opening the Black Box for a New Wave of Critical Thinking at the University of Lisbon on November 3-4, 2025. Hyperscaler infrastructure has emerged as a critical site in debates over digital sovereignty, planetary infrastructure, and global political economy. Our panel seeks to examine how hyperscaler infrastructure reconfigures territorial arrangements, state sovereignty, and market dependencies between sectors and across regions. *Full Description: * Advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) are increasingly driven by scaling laws—the principle that greater accumulation of data, computational power, and infrastructure generates exponential improvements in performance. Hyperscalers—dominant cloud service providers such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Tencent, Huawei, and Alibaba—supply the computational infrastructure that powers AI and other data-intensive industries. This dominance extends beyond technical infrastructure, reshaping the political economy of global capitalism by reinforcing dependencies among firms, states, and markets and prompting pressing questions regarding sovereignty, governance, and territorial control, especially in the context of growing geopolitical tension and the unfolding polycrisis. Drawing on Benjamin Bratton’s concept of the stack, this panel explores how hyperscaler infrastructure reorganizes political and economic power across scales. The stack is not only a technical model of computational architecture but also a political and geoeconomic structure that shapes the circulation of goods, information, and capital. Geographers’ long-standing engagement with scale—as both an analytic lens and an empirical problem—offers valuable tools for theorizing this relationship. From relational and multi-scalar methodologies to theories of scalar fixes, geography can address how the political and economic power embedded in hyperscaler infrastructure reorganizes the territorial and political arrangements between states, markets, and firms. *We invite papers that examine: * - How hyperscalers are reshaping state sovereignty and geopolitical alignments. - How dependency on hyperscalers reinforces or disrupts territorial and economic arrangements between states, firms, or networks. - The uneven geographies of hyperscaler infrastructure—who controls it, who depends on it, and who benefits from it. - How the architecture or technical structure of hyperscaler infrastructure reflects and reinforces geopolitical competition, contestation, or collaboration. - Comparative perspectives on the effects of hyperscalers across states, sectors, or scales. We encourage theoretical and empirical contributions from political economy, infrastructure studies, platform economies, and digital geographies. We particularly welcome papers that address the political and territorial implications of hyperscaler infrastructure, and its role in shaping sovereignty and global economic asymmetries, the uneven geographies of hyperscaler control and dependency, and the technical and geopolitical contestations surrounding cloud infrastructure. We encourage contributions that explore how different sectors and regions intersect with the political economy of hyperscalers. *Submission Information: * Submit abstracts (max 250 words) by *April 30, 2025* here, selecting the Special Session on Hyperscale Geographies (Special Session #10): https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfA3KwwzulWPBEubfIyP3ZAsmeGN8KXebDh... *For more information regarding the conference:* https://ceg.igot.ulisboa.pt/digitalgeographies/ We will notify you by 15 May 2025. *Session Organizers: * Ulysses Pascal, Vrije Universiteit Brussel David Bassens, Vrije Universiteit Brussel Cheng Fang, Vrije Universiteit Brussel *References: * Amoore, L. (2018). Cloud geographies: Computing, data, sovereignty. Progress in Human Geography, 42(1), 4-24. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132516662147 Bassens, D., & Hendrikse, R. (2022). Asserting Europe's technological sovereignty amid American platform finance: Countering financial sector dependence on Big Tech? *Political Geography*, 97, 102648. Bassens, D., Pažitka, V., & Hendrikse, R. (2024). Banking in the cloud: mapping big tech’s global digital technology networks. *Regional Studies*. https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2024.2391483 Bratton, B. (2015). *The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty*. MIT Press. Cai, Q. (2025). The Cultural Politics of Artificial Intelligence in China. *Theory, Culture & Society*. https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764241304718 De Goede, M., & Westermeier, C. (2022). Infrastructural geopolitics. *International Studies Quarterly*, 66(3), sqac033. Hardaker, S. (2025). From Bytes to Bricks: Advocating for a Turn Toward Platform-led Infrastructuralization in Economic Geography. *Progress in Economic Geography*, 3(1), 100038. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.peg.2025.100038 James, S., & Quaglia, L. (2024). Emergent regime complexity and epistemic barriers in ‘bigtech’ finance. *New Political Economy*, 29(6), 872–885. Langley, P., & Leyshon, A. (2021). The platform political economy of FinTech: Reintermediation, consolidation and capitalisation. *New Political Economy*, 26(3), 376–388. Narayan, D. (2022). Platform capitalism and cloud infrastructure: Theorizing a hyper-scalable computing regime. *Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space*, 54(5), 911–929. Rolf, S., & Schindler, S. (2023). The US–China rivalry and the emergence of state platform capitalism. *Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space*, 55(5), 1255–1280.