NEWSROOM: TECH AND ACCOUNTABILITY
Co-published with
Deborah Lupton / https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
September 30, 2026
How EU leaders sided with Big Tech over the public’s right to know about the true scale and environmental impact of the AI build-out, forcing a legal challenge to seek disclosure
Back in September 2023, the Artificial Intelligence revolution had barely begun. ChatGPT was less than a year old, Claude scarcely six months. European lawmakers were putting the final touches to the latest version of the Energy Efficiency Directive, a gnarly and unheralded law designed to help EU countries lower their greenhouse emissions by 2030.
It’s unlikely that the framers expected that sections requiring all data centre operators in the EU to report on their power consumption metrics and water usage would be especially controversial. Rules like this are standard in other industries.
Three years later, the situation looks very different. Countries – and companies richer than many countries – are racing to attain strategic advantage in AI. Silicon Valley insiders catastrophize about superintelligence and human survival. The White House has scolded EU regulators and declared itself to be in a race with China to win AI. And data centres – the massive buildings housing the tens of thousands of chips powering the unprecedented compute necessary for the newest AI models to function – are controversial.
These hyperscale facilities are now focal points for public resistance to AI companies. Accurate large-scale statistics on their relative performance, which could provide benchmarks for a clean versus a dirty data centre, are seen as a threat to the runaway growth of the industry.
Europe has strong right-to-know laws but the European Commission has gone from insisting that transparency was essential to public trust and regulating the environmental impact of data centres to stonewalling journalists.
Over the last year, we have used all lawful means to obtain the wealth of industry data held by the EU and its member states on the AI build-out. What we found is that the same data centre notorious among their neighbours for their noise pollution, exist behind a wall of silence in Europe.
METHODS
Reporters made Freedom of Information requests in all 27 EU member states, asking for disclosure of the full set of indicators collected under the Energy Efficiency Directive. These data include total energy consumption, amount and type of renewable energy consumption, amount of waste heat reused, average waste heat temperature, number of cooling degree days (a tracker for quantifying how much energy is needed to cool a building) and cooling system setpoints, along with types of refrigerants used in the cooling and air conditioning equipment of the data centre computer room floor. They also include total water input and potable water input, among other metrics.
We also requested a sample of the full dataset from the European Commission, since it holds all the data and was in the process of building a website to publish some aggregated totals and averages derived from it.
From the outset in October 2025, we faced non-disclosure. Ten countries told us they did not hold the figures relating to their own data centres, implying that they had no oversight of how these buildings impacted their energy efficiency goals and net zero commitments.
A half-dozen more argued for blanket confidentiality to protect commercial interests. We requested reviews, decisions by oversight bodies and court rulings where possible. We also pushed back against the European Commission’s decision not to release the data, arguing that they had not sufficiently considered the public interest. In most of these efforts we were unsuccessful. Across the continent corporate interests seemed to beat the public’s right to know.
With FOI laws and appeals processes largely exhausted, we turned to the Aarhus Convention, a binding international treaty, whose signatories include the EU and all its member states, that safeguards the public’s ability to participate in decisions relating to environmental matters. Participation requires transparency and in the opinion of experts we consulted, right-to-know provision in Aarhus supersede the commercial grounds given for non disclosure.
The resulting submission, the first of its kind we are aware of by an investigative newsroom, is now before the Aarhus Compliance Committee, a body that meets quarterly. You can find an executive summary and the full submission on our Methodology page.
STORYLINES
In France, the oversight body for information requests, the Commission d’Accès aux Documents Administratifs, ruled that the environment ministry needed to answer our request. The ministry honoured the letter of this ruling – by releasing a document with each column from the database jumbled in a random order, so that we could not derive anything useful from it. Our French partners, Mediapart, report that even a parliamentary committee examining the tech industry found itself stymied: “As long as nothing is made public, companies feel they can get away with anything,” the committee’s chairperson told us.
In Italy, Il Manifesto found that requests for new energy grid connections already exceed the total installed power in the country. In Greece, Solomon spoke to local residents who felt sidelined by new developments. “We are all being kept in the dark,” an MP said. In Spain, El Confidencial exposed the scale of Amazon’s macro-campus in the region of Aragón, the company’s biggest outside the United States.
In the Netherlands, the partial response that we did receive was potentially more disturbing for the gap it revealed. The Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO) which collects information for the EU on data centres, lists only 104 facilities in the filings it disclosed. According to the Dutch data center association (DDA), at the end of 2025 there were 186 commercial data centers with a capacity of 500 kilowatts or higher – the threshold for reporting under EU rules. So the RVO has no knowledge of almost half. According to the director of the DDA, Stijn Grove, the RVO can simply call them if they want to get a complete overview of the commercial data centers.
As well as fighting for the public’s right to know in the corridors of Brussels, we wanted to know what industry leaders thought about the trust problems they were encountering from the public as they scaled up their build-out. So we sent a reporter to the largest European industry conference, DataCloud in Cannes, to get a sense of what insider conversations were. What we heard was a roomful of industry leaders laughing as a company executive described concerned members of the public as “cave people” – “Citizens Against Virtually Everything”.
CO-PUBLICATIONS
- Solomon: EU chooses secrecy over transparency on data centers’ environmental cost
- Il Manifesto: The opaque data centre “gold rush”
- Mediapart: Data centres: public authorities shirk their transparency obligations
- Trouw: The environmental impact of three-quarters of Dutch data centres is completely unclear
- El Confidencial: The Great Cover-Up: How Tech Companies Are Concealing Their Push into AI in Europe
