Across Europe, conflicts over data centres’ demand for water, energy, and land are now playing out.
In Spain, the Your Cloud Dries Up My River movement exposes water-hungry data centres.
In Ireland, households were put on water rations to ensure data centres could keep on cooling their servers.
In the Netherlands, a new school building struggled to be connected to the electricity grid due to capacity pre-committed to a data centre.
These local conflicts will only worsen now that the European Commission plans to triple data centre capacity in Europe over the next five to seven years.
Why the EU Commission’s plan for an AI data-centres boom is short-sighted by Fieke Jansen, Kristina Irion and Alex Lutz
