EU accused of hiding data center energy and water use as AI demand surges

The complaint, lodged under the Aarhus Convention, argues that EU rules deliberately keep the public from seeing per-facility consumption figures. POLITICO, which first reported the filing, says the Commission declined to comment when asked.

The timing is awkward. Brussels has publicly committed to tripling data center capacity to keep pace with the US and China. At the same time, energy prices are climbing and local opposition to power-hungry AI facilities is spreading across Europe.

What the numbers show, and what they don't

According to the Commission's own figures, Europe's data centers used 20.7 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2025, roughly as much as Croatia consumes, and more than 8 million cubic meters of water. That is a 26% increase in electricity use and a 52% rise in water use from 2024. Those totals come from incomplete data, and they are published only in aggregate. A 2024 law, passed after lobbying by large tech companies citing commercial interests, barred Brussels and EU capitals from disclosing "all information and key performance indicators for individual data centers."

Lighthouse Reports, a Netherlands-based non-profit that runs cross-border investigations, says the Commission "holds the primary responsibility [of] denying public knowledge of the effects of Europe's massive data center build-out." The group's complaint claims the EU is in breach of the Aarhus Convention, which it has been party to since 2005. The Convention's Compliance Committee meets in November to decide whether the case is admissible.

"Transparency should be the starting point," said Diego Solier, a conservative member of the European Parliament who works on the EU's digital capacity legislation. He did not comment on the complaint itself, which was not yet public. "At the same time, transparency must be proportionate, and should not require companies to disclose genuinely commercially sensitive information."

The Commission presented a new transparency label last week. It will require operators to grade energy efficiency, water usage and clean power uptake from A to G starting next summer. Lighthouse Reports says the label still conceals total consumption and other metrics needed to assess carbon footprints. "The choice of ratios over actual consumption figures has no basis in technical constraints," the complaint reads.

The demand behind the dispute

The fight over disclosure lands in the middle of a buildout that is itself reshaping capital markets. In its State of Markets II report published on 30 September, Andreessen Horowitz wrote that tech contributed about 76% of the S&P 500's total earnings growth in 2026, as of late August, driven by demand for compute, power and networking. The firm describes a rotation "from bits to atoms," with hardware and infrastructure now leading after years behind software.

That demand has a physical footprint. BloombergNEF reported on 30 September that global sales of medium- and heavy-duty electric trucks hit a record 158,000 units in the first half of 2026, up 75% year on year, with more than nine in ten sold in China. In Europe, electric trucks reached 5.5% of total truck sales, and operators are building megawatt-scale charging stations along freight routes under the EU's Alternative Fuels Infrastructure Regulation.

Both trends feed the same grid. The Commission's own energy chief, Dan Jørgensen, told POLITICO that without aligning these large power consumers with the bloc's objectives, "they will risk undermining our ability to live up to our own targets."

Separately, research published on 30 September in Communications Earth & Environment found that the hydrothermal system created by the Chicxulub asteroid impact, which killed the non-avian dinosaurs 66 million years ago, stayed heated for 8 million years, four times longer than previously estimated. That work, led by Annemarie Pickersgill of the University of Glasgow, is about habitability on early Earth rather than EU policy, but it is a reminder that large energy releases can have very long tails.