Big Tech Inserted a Secret Clause into EU Law to Hide the Environmental Burden of Data Centers

Microsoft and DigitalEurope lobbied to insert a clause into 2024 EU regulations that bundles individual data centers' energy use, water consumption, and efficiency metrics as confidential.

As a result, facility-level data is not disclosed, and the public can only see country-level aggregate figures. Investigate Europe reported that this clause may violate the Aarhus Convention and EU transparency rules.

The key sequence of events is as follows.

• The Energy Efficiency Directive, revised in 2023, required operators to report key KPIs.
• A late-2023 draft stated that the data would be disclosed in aggregated form.
• In early 2024, Microsoft and DigitalEurope proposed identical wording to classify all individual information as confidential.
• Article 5 of the final version reflects that proposal almost verbatim.

Legal scholars pointed out that the clause is overly broad. They noted that a general presumption of confidentiality was applied to all individual data center information from the outset, when only specific items should have been judged confidential.

The European Commission explained that confidentiality was included from the start, but it was also reported that internal messages suggested even disclosure requests should be blocked. Currently, only some sustainability scores and limited country-level data are made public.

The latter part of the article also addresses the broader context. The EU is trying to make the data center permitting process faster, and Microsoft and Amazon have strongly pushed for the streamlining of environmental permitting and planning procedures. Local residents and activists worry that this process weakens public participation and shifts the power and water burden of data centers onto local communities.