EU Data‑Centre Secrecy Row
- A European debate has emerged over whether data centres should be required to disclose environmental‑impact and emissions data. - Reports say Microsoft and other American tech firms lobbied the European Commission to keep certain data‑centre emissions confidential. - The Commission denied “copy‑paste” allegations, underscoring that AI‑infrastructure transparency is now politically contested (erkansaka.net) (communicationstoday.co.in).
A fight over data-centre secrecy has opened in Brussels after reporting showed tech lobbyists helped win confidentiality for site-by-site environmental data. (investigate-europe.eu) Investigate Europe reported on April 16 that Microsoft and DigitalEurope, whose members include Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft, pushed language that kept individual facilities’ energy, water and emissions indicators out of public view. The same reporting said the European Commission later told national authorities they were “obliged” to keep those figures confidential for each data centre. (investigate-europe.eu) The legal hook is the European Union’s data-centre reporting regime under Delegated Regulation 2024/1364, adopted in March 2024. The Commission said operators must report key performance indicators to a European database by September 15, 2024, and then by May 15 each year after that. (energy.ec.europa.eu) Data centres are the warehouse-sized buildings that run cloud storage, video streaming and artificial-intelligence systems, and the Commission says their power demand and cooling-water use are rising fast. On its energy page, the Commission says data centres account for about 1.5% of global electricity use, or 415 terawatt-hours a year, and could reach 945 terawatt-hours by 2030. (energy.ec.europa.eu) The European Union originally sold the reporting rules as a transparency measure. When it announced the scheme on March 15, 2024, the Commission said the database and reporting system were meant to increase transparency and encourage lower energy use, lower water use, more renewable power and more waste-heat reuse. (energy.ec.europa.eu) That promise now sits next to a second Commission push: faster growth. On March 27, 2026, the Commission opened feedback on a new European Union-wide rating scheme for data centres and said the sector’s expansion is straining grids, carbon budgets and water resources even as Brussels prepares a broader data-centre energy-efficiency package for the second quarter of 2026. (energy.ec.europa.eu) Investigate Europe said 10 legal scholars warned the secrecy clause could conflict with European Union transparency rules and with the Aarhus Convention, the treaty that gives the public rights to environmental information. The outlet also reported that the European Union is set to triple data-centre capacity over the next five years, with €176 billion in investment expected. (investigate-europe.eu) The Commission has not accepted the claim that industry simply wrote the rule for it. Coverage of the Commission’s response said officials rejected “copy-paste” allegations, even as the underlying dispute moved from a technical reporting rule into a broader argument over who gets to see the environmental footprint of Europe’s artificial-intelligence buildout. (communicationstoday.co.in) For now, the public database exists, but the Commission says it presents aggregated data rather than site-level disclosures. That leaves the next round of rulemaking in 2026 as the place where Brussels will decide how much transparency Europe wants from the infrastructure behind cloud computing and artificial intelligence. (energy.ec.europa.eu)
