Big Tech hide ecological cost

Don’t let Big Tech hide ecological cost of AI, environment agency chief tells EU

Brussels must require tech companies to disclose data centers’ energy and water use, Leena Ylä-Mononen says.

By Zia Weise

The European Union must ensure tech companies disclose the ecological footprint of their data centers, the head of the bloc’s environment agency says. 

As Europe races to catch up with China and the United States in the artificial intelligence race, Brussels hopes to put the necessary computing power in place with a threefold increase in data center capacity within seven years.

That goal has raised sustainability concerns, given the large amounts of energy and water required to run this infrastructure. 

The European Environment Agency, a Copenhagen-based body providing independent information on sustainability issues to policymakers, worries that the data center boom will threaten the EU’s green goals. It warned that “the rapid expansion of AI presents a growing challenge to achieving climate neutrality” in a paper earlier this month. 

Leena Ylä-Mononen, the agency’s director, said the lack of transparency surrounding the environmental impact of data centers is complicating matters.

“What you cannot measure, you cannot manage,” she told POLITICO in an interview in the agency’s headquarters. 

“We still lack really clear measurements and best-practice standards,” she added. “What does the EU expect from any new data centers that are being built? I think that there's a gap and of course that's for the policymakers [to fix]. But when we have more data, then we can start understanding what the trend is and whether it is threatening the goals.” 

The European Commission is working on legislation to regulate the energy consumption of data centers and incentivize better performance. The presentation of the rules, part of a package that includes the law to triple computing capacity, has been repeatedly delayed and is now penciled in for early June. 

But the EU executive has recently come under fire from European Parliament lawmakers over a secrecy clause allowing data centers to conceal their energy consumption. The clause was thrust into the spotlight following a recent Investigate Europe report that found it was inserted into a 2024 law after lobbying by U.S. tech giants, including Microsoft.

The Commission will soon publish a rating scheme for data centers as part of the new rules, paving the way for binding minimum energy performance standards from 2030, as reported by POLITICO. The draft version drew warnings from industry that it would kill investments.

Transparency trouble

Assessing the sustainability of AI models and data centers has so far been hampered by a lack of transparency about their energy and water use.

A separate Commission document obtained by POLITICO showed that only 36 percent of data centers that are required to disclose their energy efficiency have done so.

Ylä-Mononen said it “would help” if tech companies were more transparent about the environmental footprint of their AI models and data centers, but that it was up to the EU to ensure they publish such information.

“It’s very difficult for any consumers or organizations even to understand what is the impact,” she said. “The policymakers, the EU, they have tools to also address this at the EU level, so I think it's important that the Commission is now coming up with the AI Act and other measures also looking at the data centers.” 

Data centers already consume 3 percent of the EU’s electricity, reaching up to 20 percent in Ireland, she noted. 

“If this is going to explode, to grow exponentially, we are going to have major issues around electricity sufficiency — the demand will be growing too fast and starts to compete with other industry sectors,” she said.

“I hear already some concerns from the industry side — do we have enough energy, especially green energy?” she added. “And of course it should be fossil-free energy we use to produce the energy for the data centers.” 

The AI boom can also have positive aspects, Ylä-Mononen acknowledged, such as improving efficiencies in Europe’s energy systems. 

“It has to be really intentional that we keep [ensuring] these benefits outweigh the increasing energy consumption,” she said. “AI can be used for good or bad, and we of course want it to be used for good and less for, for example, cat videos.”