EU locks away datacentre environmental metrics

EU datacentre emissions database stays closed after industry lobbying, Microsoft and trade groups win confidentiality clause in energy-efficiency rules, Brussels collects metrics it will not disclose

In 2024 the European Commission wrote a single sentence into its datacentre reporting rules: member states and the Commission “shall keep confidential” the information and key performance indicators that operators submit to an EU database. The Guardian reports the wording tracks industry submissions “almost word for word” after lobbying by Microsoft and trade groups representing firms including Google, Amazon, Meta and Netflix.

The rule sits inside the EU’s updated energy efficiency framework, which requires datacentres to report metrics such as electricity use, water consumption and other operational indicators. The Commission originally proposed publishing only aggregated figures, but the final text blocks access to site-level data even via freedom-of-information requests, according to documents seen by Investigate Europe and cited by the Guardian. In 2025 a senior Commission official reminded national authorities to treat all individual datacentre KPIs as confidential when feeding the database.

The timing matters because Europe is trying to build its way into the AI boom by expanding the physical layer: power-hungry datacentres. The Commission’s stated ambition is to triple EU datacentre capacity over the next five to seven years. As AI services push utilisation higher, the marginal cost is increasingly paid in grid connections, water permits and local opposition rather than in software breakthroughs—yet the data that would let communities compare sites and operators is being kept at national averages.

Confidentiality also changes who can check whom. National summaries can show that a country’s datacentre load is rising, but they cannot identify which facility is drawing the most power during shortages or which operator is consuming the most water during drought restrictions. That pushes scrutiny toward regulators and away from journalists, researchers and local governments that negotiate planning approvals, tax deals and infrastructure upgrades.

Legal specialists quoted by the Guardian say the clause may collide with EU transparency obligations and the Aarhus convention, which governs public access to environmental information. Jerzy Jendrośka, a long-serving member of the Aarhus convention body, said the provision appeared not to comply with the convention’s requirements.

The Commission is still collecting the numbers. What it will not do, under its own rules, is tell Europeans which datacentres are consuming the electricity and water that AI policy now assumes will be available.