Acknowledgements I thank my advisor, the Postdoctoral Scholarship Programme, and the Coordinación de Humanidades at UNAM for their support during my postdoctoral stay at PUEDJS. Latin America knows the scene: projects that promise modernisation and arrive as private infrastructures with public impacts – on water, energy, and territory. The novelty is not technical; it is political. Hyperscale computing exists only insofar as the state enables it: permits, grid interconnections, water rights, licences. If that intermediation is reduced to "attracting investment", dependence grows; if it is organised as an architecture of power, capacity grows. Digital sovereignty is not a slogan, nor a single technical layer. It is a legal–political capacity to order, with real effects, a multidimensional ensemble of dependencies: rights and their remedies (due process, privacy, freedom of expression), data governance (access, portability, public reuse), competition and taxation vis-à-vis intermediaries with market power, platform-mediated labour, security and service continuity, standard-setting and international insertion. And, as the material floor of possibility, a state's control of energy, water, and access to silicon – the preconditions that make computation physically feasible. None of these dimensions substitutes for the others; in public practice they are co-produced. The task, therefore, is not to add adjectives…
Data centres or data colonies? Energy, water, and Latin America's sovereignty test
