EU accused of hiding environmental impact of data centers

The European Union has shielded data centers from public scrutiny about how much energy they use, according to a formal complaint filed Monday against the European Commission.

The complaint lodged this week by Lighthouse Reports, and first reported by POLITICO, accuses the EU executive of setting up rules keeping the public from seeing how much energy and water are used by individual data centers.

This comes as public opposition to power-hungry AI data centers grows across Europe, while energy prices rise.

Lighthouse Reports, a Netherlands-based non-profit conducting cross-border investigations of alleged government and corporate wrongdoing, accuses the Commission of building a “wall of silence” about energy consumption.

EU policymakers are determined “to deny or deter access to, and obfuscate understanding of, how data centers are performing,” reads the complaint filed under the Aarhus Convention, a legally binding international treaty that gives the public rights to information and participation in environmental decision-making.

The challenge will face its first test in November, when the Aarhus Convention Compliance Committee meets to decide whether it is admissible. Subsequently, Aarhus could find the EU in breach of its obligations under the convention.

The Commission didn’t respond to POLITICO’s request for a comment.

Big power

As the boom in artificial intelligence drives rising energy demand, the EU has publicly declared its target of tripling data-center capacity in the coming years in a bid to keep pace with the U.S. and China. Meanwhile, as energy prices rise, public resistance to data centers is expanding around Europe.

To limit the environmental costs, the Commission presented a new transparency label last week to drive investment towards greener facilities, with minimum performance standards expected to follow.

“If we do not make sure that these big power consumers are indeed in line with our overall objectives… then they will risk undermining our ability to live up to our own targets,” the EU’s energy chief, Dan Jørgensen, said in an interview with POLITICO.

According to the Commission’s figures, Europe’s data centers used 20.7 terawatt-hours of electricity — about as much electricity as the entire nation of Croatia consumes — and more than 8 million cubic meters of water in 2025. That’s a 26% increase in electricity use and 52% in water use from 2024.

But those numbers do not fully account for the sector’s actual use, as the totals are the result of incomplete data collected by the Commission. The data has only been published in aggregate, following a 2024 law that banned Brussels and EU capitals from disclosing “all information and key performance indicators for individual data centers” amid lobbying from tech giants, which cited commercial interests.

Diego Solier, a conservative member of the European Parliament working on the EU’s legislative push to boost the bloc’s digital capacity, said Europe’s data center expansion must be accompanied by reliable information for citizens and policymakers about how much energy and water is being used.

“Transparency should be the starting point,” said Solier, who didn’t comment on the complaint itself, which wasn’t yet public. “At the same time, transparency must be proportionate, and should not require companies to disclose genuinely commercially sensitive information.”

Right to know

Lighthouse Reports says the Commission “holds the primary responsibility [of] denying public knowledge of the effects of Europe’s massive data center build-out,” by allowing operators to keep details of their consumption under wraps and dodge scrutiny in the process — in breach of the Aarhus Convention, which the EU has been a party to since 2005.

After failed efforts to force the Commission and national governments to disclose the data they hold, Lighthouse Reports is accusing them of wrongfully hiding behind secrecy carve-outs.

“The Commission sits at the top of an edifice of non-disclosure encompassing the vast majority of the EU,” the report said. “Siding with commercial secrecy over the public’s right to know erodes legitimacy and damages trust further.”

New efforts towards more transparency, including a rating label heavily criticized by industry groups, fall short of correcting course, the complainant added.

The label will require operators to grade their energy efficiency, water usage and clean power uptake on a scale of A to G, starting from next summer. But Lighthouse Reports argued that the rules still conceal the total energy consumption and other key metrics to properly assess their carbon footprints.

“The choice of ratios over actual consumption figures has no basis in technical constraints, it is a choice that favors the industry over public interest,” says the Lighthouse complaint.