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Microsoft and other U.S. technology companies successfully lobbied the European Union to conceal the environmental impact of its data centers and blocked public access to a database of green indicators, demands that were written almost verbatim into EU rules, an investigation has found.
confidentiality clause, European Commission It was added almost verbatim to its proposals following industry lobbying in 2024, blocking a review of pollution emitted by single data centres. It leaves researchers with a country-level summary of the energy footprint.
The rise of artificial intelligence chatbots has spurred a building boom of warehouses filled with chips, and people’s thirst for electricity is satisfied in part by burning fossil fuels. Legal academics have warned that the blanket confidentiality clause could breach EU transparency rules and the Aarhus Convention on public access to environmental information.
“I can’t recall a similar case in twenty years,” said Professor Jerzy Jendrośka, who has worked for 19 years at the body that oversees the convention and teaches environmental law at Poland’s Opole University. “This is clearly not in line with the norm.”
Obtained documents Visit EuropeThe Independent News Co-operative, which led the research in partnership with the Guardian and other media partners, said the rules were already being used to protect data centers from censorship.
In an email last year citing confidentiality clauses, a senior commission official reminded national authorities of their obligation to “keep confidential all information and key performance indicators of individual data centres”.
“It is important to reiterate this point because the committee has received various requests from the media or the public for documents related to the data,” the official said. “To date, all of these requests have been denied.”
The United States and China are leading the global AI boom, but even as Europe Data centers are being built at breakneck speed. The European Union aims to triple its data center capacity over the next five to seven years as it positions itself as a global leader in artificial intelligence.
To increase transparency, the Commission updated the Energy Efficiency Directive in 2023 to require data center operators to report data on key performance indicators. In further guidance, it recommended publishing “aggregated” environmental indicators.
But during a public consultation in January 2024, technology companies pushed to classify all personal information on data centers as confidential, citing commercial interests. This requirement means that the data cannot even be accessed through Freedom of Information requests.
The final text of the article differs from industry requirements by only a few words, which states that “the Commission and the Member States concerned shall keep confidential all information and key performance indicators of individual data centers communicated to the database… Such information shall be considered confidential information affecting the commercial interests of data center operators and owners.”
Industry submissions made during the public consultation show that the groups lobbying for the change are Microsoft; DigitalEurope, an industry group whose members include Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta; and Video Games Europe, whose members include Microsoft and Netflix.
Ben Youriev, a researcher at InfluenceMap, a nonprofit that tracks corporate lobbying, said this is an example of how the tech industry is considering a shift to using more energy.
He said: “The industry has previously been outspoken in supporting clean energy and rapid emissions reductions, but many companies have since remained silent. Instead, they appear to be prioritizing the rapid construction of data center infrastructure around the world rather than supporting clean energy and rapid emissions reductions.”
DigitalEurope did not respond to a request for comment. The commission and European video games companies declined to comment.
Microsoft said it supports greater transparency in data centers because sustainability disclosure helps drive better outcomes and build public trust. “We are taking further steps to increase openness while protecting confidential business information,” a spokesperson said.
EU leaders view the regulation as the first step towards developing a common EU rating scheme for data centres. Public consultation on the second phase of the legislation, which ends this month, plans to publish sustainability scores from the database to “make it easier to compare different data centers in the same area and promote new designs or appropriate efficiencies for data centres”. Under current proposals, much of the content of operator reports would remain confidential.
The committee’s internal position is that disclosing information about each data center could cause operators to stop reporting on their sustainability metrics, people familiar with the matter said. However, EU data shows that only 36% of qualified data centers comply with existing reporting requirements.
Alex de Vries-Gao, a researcher at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, said the industry has a “real interest in hiding the numbers” and has mostly had to rely on aggregated data when seeking to quantify the environmental footprint of artificial intelligence.
“Public information is extremely limited. You often have to go to great lengths to come up with any numbers,” he said.
Under the Aarhus Convention, the EU is obliged to ensure that authorities systematically provide environmental information to the public.
Luc Lafrison, former president of Belgium’s Constitutional Court and emeritus professor of environmental law at Ghent University, said the confidentiality clause was a “clear violation” of EU transparency rules and the Aarhus Convention.
Kristina Irion, associate professor of information law at the University of Amsterdam, also came to the same conclusion. She said the “presumption of blanket confidentiality” wrongly favors corporate interests over public access to at least some data.
“Confidential information that affects the commercial interests of data center companies should be determined on a case-by-case basis as to what is worthy of protection,” she said.
