Dr Ana Valdivia
Lecturer in AI, Government and Policy, Oxford Internet Institute
Academic profile
About
Dr Ana Valdivia is a Departmental Research Lecturer in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Government and Policy at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII).
With a background in mathematics, her research focuses on bridging the gap between AI studies and the social sciences by combining both quantitative and qualitative methodologies. Her current research agenda focuses on the AI supply chains by investigating trade-off between environmental costs and social benefits of AI, from mineral extraction to chip manufacturing, data centres and electronic waste dumps across different geographies.
Dr Valdivia was awarded the Young Academy of Spain, which is a member of the International Science Council. In 2025, she was also a Visiting Research Fellow at the UCL Centre of Advanced Studies. In the same year, she received the Teaching Excellence Award from the Social Sciences Division of the University of Oxford. In 2023, her research on AI supply chains was made possible by a grant from the British Academy.
Expertise
- Artificial intelligence
- Sustainability
- Algorithmic accountability
- Climate change
- Environmental impacts
- Data centres
- GPUs
- Supply chains
- Media ecology
- Algorithmic governance
- LLMs (large language models)
Selected publications
- The supply chain capitalism of AI: a call to (re)think algorithmic harms and resistance through environmental lens (2024)
- The politics of artificial intelligence supply chains (2025)
- Thirsty Forests and Expansive Droughts: The environmental impacts of data centers in Latin America (2025)
- Data Ecofeminism (2025)
- Gender Trouble in Language Models: An Empirical Audit Guided by Gender Performativity Theory (2025)
- Datafication Genealogies beyond Algorithmic Fairness: Making Up Racialised Subjects (2023)
- There is an elephant in the room: towards a critique on the use of fairness in biometrics (2022)
- Neither opaque nor transparent: A transdisciplinary methodology to investigate datafication at the EU borders (2022)
- How fair can we go in machine learning? Assessing the boundaries of accuracy and fairness (2021)
- Sentiment Analysis in TripAdvisor (2017)
Recent media work
- From Mexico to Ireland, Fury Mounts Over a Global A.I. Frenzy (The New York Times, 2025)
- Water For Data: What’s the environmental cost of our increasing data usage? (Al Jazeera, 2025)
- Mexico’s datacentre industry is booming – but are more drought and blackouts the price communities must pay? (The Guardian, 2024)
- Forget jobs. AI is coming for your water (Context, 2024)
Languages
English, Spanish, Catalan