Digital Colonialism and AI Supply Chains: Labour and Infrastructure in Indonesia's Data Centre Economy

As artificial intelligence systems rapidly grow around the world, their expansion is underpinned by increasingly complex supply chains that link data centres, extractive industries, and distributed forms of digital labour. This paper examines AI supply chains as socio-technical systems of infrastustructure that exacerbate existing unequal power relations, with a specific focus on Indonesia and the rapidly expanding Jakarta data centre corridor as a key site of digital infrastructure investment in Southeast Asia. While existing research has often addressed data annotation or platform labour in isolation, less attention has been paid to how the growth of AI infrastructure, particularly the recent hyper-growth of data centres in the Southeast Asia region, reconfigures labour, environmental, and governance dynamics within national, regional, and international contexts. Indonesia is a critical site in the global AI economy, as a rapidly expanding data centre hub where infrastructure investment, labour markets, and regulatory frameworks intersect to shape emerging norms in AI supply chains.

The paper draws on a mixed-methods approach combining legal and policy analysis with ethnographic and participatory fieldwork conducted across Jakarta and surrounding industrial zones over 18 months. This approach includes analysis of national regulatory frameworks, investment policies, and emerging global standards, alongside interviews and grounded participatory research with workers, communities, and industry stakeholders. Through this approach, the paper examines the layered labour regimes embedded within the data centre economy, including construction and logistics workers involved in infrastructure build-out, technicians responsible for maintenance and operations, security and ancillary service staff, as well as more distributed forms of human labour such as data annotation and content moderation.

The analysis shows how these forms of labour are structured through subcontracting arrangements, global capital flows, and fragmented regulatory oversight, shaping working conditions, occupational safety and health, and access to labour protections. In Indonesia, where state and private actors are actively positioning the country as a regional data infrastructure hub, these dynamics raise critical questions about how “decent work” is defined and operationalized across opaque and multi-layered supply chains. The paper also situates data centre expansion within broader environmental and resource constraints, including energy demand, land use, and water consumption, and examines how these pressures intersect with local labour markets and community livelihoods. It further interprets these dynamics through the lens of digital colonialism, tracing how extractive models of resource use and data production reproduce asymmetries in value capture, whereby environmental and labour costs are disproportionately borne in the Majority World.

Particular attention is given to governance challenges arising from supply chain opacity and jurisdictional complexity, especially as emerging regulatory frameworks such as the EU AI Act shape global expectations around governance. The paper outlines an interdisciplinary research agenda connecting digital labour, infrastructure, and environmental governance, highlighting the role of procurement standards, meaningful oversight and accountability, and social dialogue in strengthening labour outcomes and protecting rights. By foregrounding Indonesia's data centre labour economy, it centres the human impacts of AI supply chains, tracing how labour risks are distributed across subcontracting structures and identifying mechanisms to strengthen accountability and worker protections.