Spain is at a critical crossroads as the rapid proliferation of digital infrastructure clashes with the stark realities of the climate crisis. In a unified stance, five of the country’s leading environmental organizations—Amigas de la Tierra, Ecologistas en Acción, Greenpeace, SEO/BirdLife, and WWF—have submitted a series of formal objections to the government’s draft royal decree on data centers. While the coalition acknowledges the necessity of regulating a sector that is expanding at an exponential rate, they argue that the current legislative proposal falls short of providing the safeguards needed to protect Spain’s strained natural resources.
The fundamental concern of the coalition lies in the immense scale of resource consumption required to sustain modern digital services, particularly those driven by Artificial Intelligence. Citing the 2025 Energy and AI report from the International Energy Agency, the environmental groups underscore that a single 100 MW data center can draw as much electricity annually as 100,000 households. This massive demand for power is frequently coupled with an equally alarming thirst for water, which is used for the cooling systems essential to preventing server failure.
The proposed Meta project in Talavera de la Reina serves as a sobering case study for the organizations. With an anticipated capacity of 248 MW, the project is projected to consume roughly 504 million liters of water annually. While the industry often points to technological advancements in cooling efficiency as a solution, environmentalists warn that these improvements are being eclipsed by the sheer, unbridled growth of the total number of facilities. In the context of a nation facing chronic drought and rising temperatures, this trajectory is described as fundamentally unsustainable.
To address these risks, the coalition has put forward a comprehensive set of demands for the government to integrate into the final royal decree. Chief among them is the establishment of hard, maximum limits on both energy and water usage per facility. Furthermore, they argue that regulatory assessments must pivot from evaluating projects in isolation to analyzing the “cumulative impact” of multiple centers within a single geographic area. By failing to look at the regional aggregate of resource pressure, the government risks triggering local grid failures and water shortages.
The organizations also insist that any growth in the digital sector must be underpinned by a 100% renewable energy supply. They specify that this electricity should be sourced through storage and flexibility systems, explicitly rejecting the inclusion of fossil fuels or nuclear energy in the sector’s power portfolio. Complementing this is a call for rigorous territorial planning that prioritizes the protection of biodiversity and ensures that data centers do not compete with essential human activities or agricultural needs for precious water and electricity.
The environmental groups are joined in their efforts by an expanding network of social movements and academic collectives, including platforms such as Tu nube seca mi río (Your cloud dries up my river) and Aigua és Vida. These groups are demanding greater transparency, mandatory public participation, and binding democratic consultations before any new site is authorized.
As the debate intensifies, it reflects a broader tension between the promise of digital advancement and the limits of the planet. For the coalition, the digital transition cannot be considered “green” if it relies on the depletion of the very natural systems upon which society depends. They maintain that efficiency alone is an insufficient strategy; without strict legal caps and a precautionary development framework, the expansion of the digital sector threatens to exacerbate the water and energy crisis already plaguing the region. The government’s response to these objections will likely define whether Spain’s digital future can be achieved in harmony with its environmental security.
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