critical infrastructure lab

The Case for a Temporary Moratorium on Large Data Centers in Europe, by Michelle Thorne, Aurora Gomez Delgado, Fieke Jansen, and Rosi Leonard.

The European Commission says expanding AI infrastructure is essential to Europe’s technological sovereignty. Yet, it has not shown why Europe needs to triple data center capacity, nor how existing infrastructure is being used, nor how rapid expansion can be reconciled with Europe’s climate, energy and democratic commitments.

There is no solid evidence for the need to triple data center capacity, with evidence to suggest that many data centers in Europe are underutilized and that new data center development will be dominated by US tech and co-location firms who prioritize serving the largest multinational corporate cloud providers, most of which are US-based.

Nevertheless, the European Commission is aggressively dismantling environmental protections and democratic oversight to achieve this target. Read more.