The European Environment Agency, a Copenhagen-based body providing independent information on sustainability issues to policymakers, worries that the data center boom will threaten the EU’s green goals. It warned that “the rapid expansion of AI presents a growing challenge to achieving climate neutrality” in a paper earlier this month.
Leena Ylä-Mononen, the agency’s director, said the lack of transparency surrounding the environmental impact of data centers is complicating matters.
“What you cannot measure, you cannot manage,” she told POLITICO in an interview in the agency’s headquarters.
“We still lack really clear measurements and best-practice standards,” she added. “What does the EU expect from any new data centers that are being built? I think that there’s a gap and of course that’s for the policymakers [to fix]. But when we have more data, then we can start understanding what the trend is and whether it is threatening the goals.”
The European Commission is working on legislation to regulate the energy consumption of data centers and incentivize better performance. The presentation of the rules, part of a package that includes the law to triple computing capacity, has been repeatedly delayed and is now penciled in for early June.
But the EU executive has recently come under fire from European Parliament lawmakers over a secrecy clause allowing data centers to conceal their energy consumption. The clause was thrust into the spotlight following a recent Investigate Europe report that found it was inserted into a 2024 law after lobbying by U.S. tech giants, including Microsoft.
