What is Compute?
Compute has emerged as a crucial technical concept for understanding contemporary digital infrastructures and their political economy (Berry and Fagerjord 2017: 16). The notion represents an abstraction of computational capacity that can be dynamically allocated, measured, and priced across distributed systems. Unlike traditional notions of processing power or computational resources, compute represents “an abstract unit of computation which tends to be priced at a particular level by cloud server companies so one can purchase a certain capacity of computation” (Berry 2023a). The concept of compute emerges from what we might call the infrastructural turn in digital technologies, particularly the move towards cloud computing and distributed systems. As I have previously argued, these systems create what I call infrasomatisations which rely on “a complex fusion of endosomatic capacities and exosomatic technics” (Berry 2023a) that make possible new forms of algorithmic governance. Comput
