“…Recent scholarly work has primarily studied the assetization of data relating to how big tech firms such as Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft exploit big data, when they assetize personal data in advertisementdriven surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019), or when they turn user metrics into assets that might be positively valued by investors (Birch et al, 2021). Where Zuboff's analysis, in particular, is surprisingly silent on financial markets and the role they play in data capitalism, we demonstrate that the turn to alternative data, and thus its prospecting and assetization, amounts to the financialization (Krippner, 2005) of otherwise non-financial data within the circuit of finance (Aitken, 2017;Bernards, 2019;Tan, 2020). This entails an important change in the relevant actor composition when it comes to understanding the connection between data and capitalism.…”