From large-scale projects to compute climate data, socio-technical experiments with ‘smart’energy grids and ‘smart’cities, to the attempts of traditional energy companies to decarbonise through alternative fuels, post-carbon futures are imagined as digital and ethereal by corporate capitalism, governmental, and supragovernmental organisations. These imaginaries hinge on an old but still powerful idea that sees digital technologies and information flows as immaterial, and thus carrying the promise to enact ‘post-industrial’societies that are not driven by the extraction and consumption of fossil fuels. Contemporary enactments of this idea flourish in public, industrial, and engineering discourse through imaginaries of ‘sustainable’planetary futures moulded with the help of AI, predictive analytics, algorithmic-driven automated decision-making, and practices of data mining, all coordinated and produced in the cloud. A vibrant and still emergent scholarship at the nexus of the anthropology of data and critical studies of media infrastructures has sought to go beyond these dominant narratives and to understand what shapes them. This scholarship has insisted on the crucial importance of adopting a situated perspective on cloud computing and the digital industries and infrastructures that support it, and have recognised the materialities and geologies of digital infrastructures and technologies (Hogan 2015, Dourish 2017, Brodie 2020a, Taffel 2021, Velkova 2021). It has explored the (geo) politics of their physical emplacement in particular geographies–through attentiveness to submarine fibre-optic cables, data centres, the mines of rare materials that power AI and cryptocurrencies (Starosielski 2015a, Lally, Kay, and Thatcher 2019, Crawford 2021, Johnson 2019). It has also drawn attention to what is discarded and left behind (Gabrys 2013, Liboiron and Lepawsky 2022, Brodie and Velkova 2021). This expansion of data, and the infrastructures, ecologies, and labours it requires, means we need to set a research agenda assessing present and future impact. Within this emergent field of research, data centres–one of the most visible manifestations of cloud infrastructure–have provided a valuable entry point for exploring and engaging with new questions of the environmental impact of an increasingly digital world (see also Ch. 2). Inside data centres, the growing vol-https://doi. org/10.1515/9783110745641-005