As Artificial Intelligence threatens to radically reshape the global economy, the rapid expansion of data centers around the world demonstrates that AI’s future depends on material infrastructures and extractive industries. This event examines the global growth of AI data centers fueling the AI race. Drawing from new and ongoing fieldwork in Africa (?) and the U.S.-Mexico border, this session explores East Asian firms’ participation in developing AI supply chains, the environmental impact of data infrastructure and local communities’ responses to the global data center boom. Date: October 30, 2026 (Fri) Time: 15:30-17:30 Venue: HYS G05 (G/F), Hui Yeung Shing Building, CUHK Speakers: Prof. Miao Lu (Lingnan University) Title: Building the Tropical Cloud: The Energy Politics of Data Centers in Ghana Dr. Gabriel Antonio Solis (CUHK) Title: Foxconn in the Desert: Taiwanese Investment, AI Infrastructure and Colonial Futures in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands Discussant: Prof. TENG Shao-Hung Tim (CUHK) Moderator: Prof. Cheung Shoan Yin (CUHK) About the speakers: Miao Lu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University, Hong Kong. She works at the intersection of critical media studies, science and technology studies, and Africa-China studies. She is the author of The Transsion Approach: Translating Chinese Mobile Technology in Africa (University of Illinois Press, 2025). She is currently working on a new research project, entitled Tropical Data Centers: Media, Heat, and Energy Politics in Afro-Asia. Gabriel Antonio Solis a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Cultural Studies and is a historian of capitalism, labor and borders, focusing on the history of the global factory in East Asia and the U.S.-Mexico Border. Gabriel received his PhD in History at Columbia University, where he wrote his dissertation on the entangled history of the first export-processing zones in Taiwan and Mexico. He is originally from the El Paso-Ciudad Juárez border and frequently writes about border history, culture and politics for public-facing journals. Enquiry: cuccs@cuhk.edu.hk