This chapter question smart and sustainable futures through a glaring blind spot: the data centres that underpin these futures are themselves energy-intensive enterprises. These buildings consume an incredible amount of energy to power and cool the computing equipment they contain. This chapter also intervenes by engaging with the unforeseen futures created by the extraction and use of natural resources and the reworking of local geographies entailed by the construction and running of data centres. Amidst growing public and political awareness about the environmental costs of data centres, data centre providers are engaging in efforts to ‘green’ their infrastructure. In doing so the chapter draws on ethnographic research to demonstrate the importance of the past in defining the shape of emerging systems, and identifying the pressure points at which they are disrupted, which will invariably shape the future. The cases investigate countries across the global North and South, in heavily urbanised as well as in less densely populated areas, addressing the presumed opacity of data centres by gaining access to these built spaces as well as around them, while also conducting research with municipal officials, energy operators and their neighbouring communities, among others.