Microsoft and a number of U.S. technology companies have been accused of successfully lobbying the European Union to "hide" the environmental impact of their data centers from public view. A confidentiality clause for the green indicator database was almost completely written into the draft EU regulations. The provision blocks outside scrutiny of pollution at individual data centers, and researchers will only be able to see energy footprint data aggregated by country.
With the rise of artificial intelligence chatbot craze, the construction of a large number of "computing power warehouses" equipped with high-performance chips is accelerating in Europe, and their huge electricity demand depends in part on burning fossil gas. Many legal scholars have warned that this "one-size-fits-all" confidentiality arrangement may violate the EU's current transparency rules and the Aarhus Convention that protects the public's right to know the environment. Jerzy Jandroszka, a professor of environmental law at Opole University in Poland who has served on the Aarhus Convention supervisory authority for 19 years, said: “I can’t think of any similar case in the past twenty years. This is obviously inconsistent with the spirit of the Convention.”
According to documents obtained by the independent journalism cooperative Investigate Europe, this confidentiality rule is already being used in practice to "shield" data centers. A senior European Commission official cited the confidentiality clause in an email last year, reminding national authorities of their obligation to "keep all information and key performance indicators of individual data centers confidential." "This must be reiterated because the committee has received numerous requests for documents from the media and the public, all of which have so far been denied," the official stressed.
In order to improve the transparency of energy use, the European Commission revised the Energy Efficiency Directive in 2023, requiring data center operators to report a series of key performance indicator data, and proposed to disclose "aggregated" environmental indicators in subsequent guidance. However, during the public consultation in January 2024, a number of technology companies requested that all data involving a single data center be classified as confidential on the grounds of commercial interests and may not even be obtained through information disclosure applications.
The final text is only a few words different from the industry's demands, clearly stipulating: "The Commission and relevant member states shall keep confidential all information and key performance indicators of individual data centers submitted to the database... Such information shall be regarded as confidential information affecting the commercial interests of data center operators and owners." Consultation materials show that the main groups involved in promoting this modification include Microsoft, as well as DigitalEurope, an industry organization whose members include Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta, and Video Games Europe, whose members include Microsoft and Netflix.
Ben Yuriev, a researcher at InfluenceMap, a non-profit organization that has long tracked corporate lobbying activities, believes that this incident reflects the changing attitude of the technology industry on energy use issues. He pointed out: "In the past, the industry has been active in supporting clean energy and emission reductions, but now many companies have chosen to remain silent and instead prioritize the rapid expansion of data center infrastructure around the world rather than promoting clean energy development and rapid emission reductions."
DigitalEurope did not comment, while the European Commission and Video Games Europe declined to comment. A Microsoft spokesperson responded that the company supports increasing data center transparency and believes that sustainable information disclosure can help achieve better results and enhance public trust. Microsoft is taking further steps to increase openness while protecting confidential business information.
The European Commission internally regards this data reporting mechanism as the first step in establishing a unified EU data center rating system. In legislation currently being consulted and expected to be introduced as a second phase, the committee plans to publish data center sustainability scores from the database "to make it easier to compare different data centers in the same area and promote the adoption of new designs or appropriate efficiency solutions." However, even under the new plan, most of the detailed data reported by operators will still be considered confidential and will not be disclosed to the public.
According to sources close to the issue, the committee's internal view is that if individual data center information is fully disclosed, it may cause operators to simply stop reporting sustainability data. However, current EU statistics show that only 36% of data centers that currently meet the reporting conditions have fulfilled their reporting obligations.
Alex de Vries-Gao, a scholar at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam who has long studied the environmental footprint of artificial intelligence, noted that there is “a real strong incentive to hide the numbers” in the industry. Publicly available information is extremely limited, he said, and researchers often have to "rack their brains to come up with some numbers" and mostly rely on highly aggregated statistics.
Under the Aarhus Convention, the EU is obliged to ensure that environmental information is systematically disclosed to the public by competent authorities. Luc Lavraisen, former president of the Belgian Constitutional Court and emeritus professor of environmental law at Ghent University, believes that this confidentiality clause is a "clear violation" of EU transparency rules and the requirements of the Aarhus Convention. Kristina Illion, associate professor of information law at the University of Amsterdam, came to the same conclusion, criticizing this "blanket default of confidentiality" approach as unduly favoring corporate interests while ignoring the public's right to know at least some of the data. In her view, what kind of information is indeed "confidential information that affects the commercial interests of data center enterprises" should be judged on a case-by-case basis and should not be included in the scope of confidentiality across the board.