TECHNOLOGY
Most European Data Centers Keep Energy and Water Use Secret, Investigation Finds
A year-long investigation by Lighthouse Report and Trouw found that the vast majority of European data centers withhold environmental data, despite an EU directive requiring disclosure. In the Netherlands, fewer than a quarter of large facilities report their electricity and water usage.
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The vast majority of data centers across Europe keep their environmental impact secret, according to a year-long investigation by Lighthouse Report, conducted in collaboration with Dutch newspaper Trouw and other European media outlets. In the Netherlands, fewer than a quarter of larger data centers publish figures on their electricity and drinking water consumption.
Reporters spent a year trying to obtain this data by invoking freedom of information laws across multiple European countries. The effort largely failed, with most requests yielding no usable results.
Under the European Energy Efficiency Directive (EED), data centers with an installed capacity of at least 500 kilowatts are required to report their energy and water consumption. Despite the directive having been in force for three years, few operators actually comply.
The scale of the gap is stark in the Netherlands. According to the Dutch Datacenter Association, the country had 186 commercial data centers with a capacity of 500 kW or more at the end of last year. Yet the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO), which collects this data on behalf of the EU, holds records for only 104 of them. Even among those, public figures exist for electricity use at just 44 centers and water use at 47 — fewer than a quarter of the country's larger facilities. The RVO told Trouw it holds additional data on some centers but declined to provide the figures.
The secrecy comes as data centers' footprint grows rapidly, driven first by cloud computing and now by the boom in artificial intelligence. Statistics Netherlands (CBS) reported that data centers consumed 5.1 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in the Netherlands in 2024 — 4.6 percent of national electricity use, nearly double the figure from five years earlier. Grid operator TenneT projects that data centers could account for 10 to 15 percent of the country's electricity consumption by 2030, even as a shortage of grid capacity leaves businesses, institutions and housing developments stuck on waiting lists for connections.
RVO data released this summer showed that Microsoft's largest Dutch data center alone consumes the equivalent of 1 percent of the country's total electricity use. Google, which operates two large data centers in the Netherlands, does not disclose comparable figures.
Water consumption remains even less transparent. Data centers are estimated to account for roughly 0.1 percent of total water use in the Netherlands — a small share, but one that carries growing weight as climate change brings longer droughts and tighter water constraints.