Europe's data centers won't say how much water and power they use
A year-long investigation across all 27 EU member states found that the environmental cost of the data-center buildout is, by design, unmeasurable — and a pilot program suggests Google's answer to publishers is measured in rounding errors.
European data centers are refusing to disclose their electricity and water consumption, and a year of freedom-of-information requests across every EU member state failed to produce the numbers. Lighthouse Reports spent twelve months filing FOI requests with national agencies and the European Commission alongside Trouw and other European outlets. In the Netherlands, which hosts 186 commercial data centers at or above the 500-kilowatt threshold that triggers reporting, the national enterprise agency RVO holds public electricity figures for 44 of them and water figures for 47 — under a quarter. The European Energy Efficiency Directive has required this reporting for three years.
The EU-wide picture is the same. Only about 36 percent of in-scope data centers submitted data for the 2024 reporting period, and when researchers asked the Commission for the aggregate, it withheld the material citing commercial interests. That refusal was upheld on appeal in June 2026, and the European Ombudsman is now inquiring into it. The investigation has filed the first Aarhus Convention complaint on the issue — a legal route that treats environmental information as a public right rather than a corporate courtesy.
Why the gap matters is arithmetic. Dutch data centers consumed 5.1 billion kilowatt-hours in 2024, about 4.6 percent of national electricity and roughly double their draw five years earlier; grid operator TenneT projects 10 to 15 percent by 2030, in a country where businesses, research institutes and housing developments sit on grid-connection waiting lists. Microsoft's largest Dutch site alone accounted for about 1 percent of national consumption last year. The EU's planned A-to-G efficiency grades, expected in 2027, will publish a letter rather than a total — a grade is not a number you can plan a grid around.
The reporting regime's failure is not passive. It is the predictable result of asking operators to volunteer data that only ever creates a reason to say no to them. We covered the American end of this fight earlier this month — New Jersey fined a data center $1.07 million over 62 unpermitted gas generators — and the pattern is identical on both sides of the Atlantic: enforcement arrives only after the diesel is already installed and the water already drawn.
Google's year-old "AI contribution" pilot is paying roughly 100 publishers for content used in AI Overviews, AI Mode and Gemini, and for the smallest participants the money rounds to nothing. The Information reported the payment spread: several small and midsize sites earn less than 0.1 percent of their ad revenue, some received under $1,000 across several months, one publisher took $50,000 to $60,000 over a few months and another clears more than $1 million a year. Niche subjects with devoted audiences — anime, gaming — appear to earn more. Participants told the paper they cannot tell how Google calculates any of it, and the amounts move month to month without explanation.
Two things make that more than a pricing complaint. Digiday, which broke the program's existence two weeks earlier, quoted publisher sources calling the early returns "peanuts" and describing the process as "quite black box" — independent confirmation of the same opacity from different sources. And the money arrives against a falling baseline: multiple studies show AI Overviews cut clicks to the open web, independent publishers filed a European Commission complaint over exactly that in July 2025, and Brussels opened an antitrust investigation in December 2025 into whether Google uses publisher content in AI features without adequate payment or a genuine way to opt out.
The structural move is the individual deal. By negotiating one publisher at a time, Google converts a collective bargaining problem into a prisoner's dilemma, where the publishers who hold out get replaced by the ones who don't. Which is why the more consequential development would be legal rather than commercial: a German court has already ruled that AI Overviews are Google's own content rather than a summary of someone else's, and if that reading spreads, every AI answer becomes a licensing event — a much larger liability than the pilot is designed to settle.
What to watch: whether the Ombudsman's inquiry forces the Commission to release the EU-wide data-center figures it withheld, and whether any large publisher publicly rejects the AI contribution pilot rather than negotiating quietly.
If a data center's grid connection is a public resource, should its water and power totals be public by default? Tell us in the comments.
Sources: Lighthouse Reports · NL Times · Solomon · Digiday · The Decoder · The Information · European Commission
