Excerpt: Data centers are at the heart of metabolic injustices proliferating across much of the periurban and rural United States. Amidst this data center boom and its concomitant AI revolution, it is no surprise that the people and places most vulnerable to their myriad harms are the same people and places that have resisted centuries of colonization, extractive capitalism, land and livelihood dispossession, and environmental injustice. Tech billionaires and their allies at various scales of government argue that the expanding data-industrial complex is necessary to support the insatiable appetites of AI into the future. But at what and whose cost?