Microsoft and Other US Companies Pressure EU, Data Center Emission Data "Sealed"
Microsoft and several other US tech companies are accused of successfully lobbying the EU to obscure the environmental impact of their data centers from public view. A confidentiality clause regarding a green metrics database has been almost verbatim incorporated into an EU draft regulation. This clause hinders scrutiny of individual data center pollution levels, and researchers will only be able to see aggregated energy footprint data by country.
With the surge in popularity of artificial intelligence chatbots, a large number of "computing power warehouses" equipped with high-performance chips are being rapidly built in Europe, and their massive electricity demand relies in part on the combustion of fossil fuels. Several legal scholars warn that this "one-size-fits-all" confidentiality arrangement may violate the EU's existing transparency rules and the public's right to know about the environment, as guaranteed by the Aarhus Convention. Jerzy Jandrośka, a professor of environmental law at the University of Opole in Poland who served on the supervisory body of the Aarhus Convention for 19 years, said: "In the past twenty years, I can't think of any similar case. This is clearly inconsistent with the spirit of the convention."
According to documents obtained by the independent news cooperative "Investigate Europe," this confidentiality rule has already been used in practice to "shield" data centers. A senior EU Commission official cited the confidentiality clause in an email last year, reminding national authorities of their obligation to "keep all information and key performance indicators for individual data centers confidential." The official emphasized: "This must be reiterated, as the Commission has received an increasing number of access to document requests from the media and the public, all of which have been rejected."
To improve energy use transparency, the European Commission revised the Energy Efficiency Directive in 2023, requiring data center operators to report a series of key performance indicator data, and proposed to publicly disclose "aggregated" environmental indicators in subsequent guidance. However, in a public consultation in January 2024, several tech companies requested that all data relating to individual data centers be classified as confidential for commercial reasons, and even not be obtainable through freedom of information requests.
The final text differed from the industry's demands by only a few numbers, explicitly stating: "The Commission and the relevant Member States shall keep all information and key performance indicators submitted to the database relating to individual data centers confidential… Such information shall be considered confidential information affecting the commercial interests of data center operators and owners." Consultation materials show that the main groups pushing for this amendment included Microsoft, as well as DigitalEurope, an industry organization whose members include Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta, and Video Games Europe, whose members include Microsoft and Netflix.
Ben Yuryev, a researcher at InfluenceMap, a non-profit organization that tracks corporate lobbying activities, believes this reflects a shift in the tech industry's attitude towards energy use. He pointed out: "In the past, the industry was positive about supporting clean energy and emissions reduction, but now many companies are choosing to remain silent, prioritizing the rapid expansion of data center infrastructure globally rather than promoting clean energy development and rapid emissions reduction."
DigitalEurope declined to comment, while the European Commission and Video Games Europe refused to comment. A Microsoft spokesperson responded that the company supports increasing data center transparency, believing that sustainability information disclosure helps achieve better results and enhance public trust, and said Microsoft is taking further steps to improve openness while protecting confidential business information.
The Commission sees this data reporting mechanism internally as the first step towards establishing a unified EU data center rating system. In legislation currently under consultation, expected to be released as a second phase, the Commission plans to publish sustainability ratings for data centers from the database "to make it easier to compare different data centers in the same region and promote the adoption of new designs or appropriate efficient solutions." However, even under the new scheme, most of the detailed data submitted by operators will still be considered confidential and not publicly available.
According to sources close to the issue, the Commission believes that fully disclosing information about individual data centers could lead operators to simply stop reporting sustainability data. However, existing EU statistics show that only 36% of data centers that meet the reporting requirements have fulfilled their reporting obligations.
Alex de Vries-Gijs, a scholar at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam who studies the environmental footprint of artificial intelligence, points out that there is a "strong motivation within the industry to hide the numbers." He said that information is extremely limited, researchers often have to "rack their brains to calculate some numbers," and mostly rely on highly aggregated statistical data.
Under the Aarhus Convention, the EU is obliged to ensure that environmental information is systematically disclosed to the public by competent authorities. Luc Lavrysen, former president of the Belgian Court of Cassation and emeritus professor of environmental law at Ghent University, believes that this confidentiality clause "clearly violates" EU transparency rules and the requirements of the Aarhus Convention. Kristina Irion, an associate professor of information law at the University of Amsterdam, reached the same conclusion, criticizing the "blanket presumption of confidentiality" as unduly favoring corporate interests and ignoring the public's right to know at least some of the data. In her view, what information truly constitutes "confidential information affecting the commercial interests of data center companies" should be determined on a case-by-case basis, rather than being uniformly included in the scope of confidentiality.