Driven by tech giants like Microsoft and Google, as well as a wave of newcomers entering the market, data centers are being hailed by policymakers as critical infrastructure in the push for digital sovereignty, technological innovation, and global competitiveness — particularly in the face of growing dominance from American and Chinese tech powers.
In the rolling farmlands of North Holland, massive windowless structures belonging to Microsoft and Google now dominate what was once an agricultural landscape. In Frankfurt, the European Union’s largest data center hub, uninviting monolithic blocks have risen in the last decade to replace traditional small and medium-sized businesses. Across Italy’s already urbanized Lombardy region, the rapidly increasing construction of such facilities is reducing green spaces, while Romania’s countryside faces comparable encroachments with little social opposition.
Diverging responses to data centers have less to do with the technology itself and more with how it’s introduced and implemented. Public acceptance hinges on whether communities feel a direct impact — from resource consumption to landscape transformation — and whether authorities and tech companies meaningfully engage with local concerns. From Eastern to Western Europe, clashes with the data center industry have only just begun.
As the EU races to build its digital future, looking into the conflicts exposes a deep tension: technological sovereignty does not depend on fiber-optic cables and server racks but on the consent and participation of the very communities hosting them.
The Allure of Economic Growth and Innovation
For many EU regions, data centers represent a gateway to the digital economy. The building of these facilities promises employment and investment, but also the transformation of areas into tech hubs, which is associated with attracting businesses and skilled professionals, as well as increased tax revenue.
Alongside the expansion of data centers across Europe, economic benefits are promised for local communities. These are, however, largely overstated.
As happened in Mischii, a small commune of around 1,800 inhabitants in southern Romania. The region is heavily affected by industrial decline and Romania’s second most at-risk area for poverty in 2023, according to Eurostat.
ClusterPower’s data center arrived in 2020 and received a warm welcome from local authorities: “We are incredibly proud to have an investor on board and to see people talking about the data center in Mischii. The company contributes to the local community by paying taxes here and has chosen this area as its headquarters,” explained the mayor of Mischii. No documentation was provided to verify the tax revenue actually generated for the commune.
Romania’s Ministry of Finance awarded ClusterPower €17 million in state aid — nearly half of the project’s €36 million investment, with the company committing to creating a mere 21 jobs in Mischii. Even this very modest goal was not accomplished. According to the Ministry’s final implementation report in June 2024, only 10 positions materialized. In 2022, the mayor of Craiova, the seventh largest city in Romania, and a local councilman claimed ClusterPower would create around 300 vacancies, many supposedly for Craiova residents — a figure that stands in stark contrast to the Ministry of Finance’s official documentation.
Just like in Mischii, a similar hope for economic revival animated the Netherlands’ North Holland region two decades ago. By the early 2000s, Wieringermeer municipality officials faced a perfect storm of rural decline — employment shortages, an aging population, housing stagnation, and the slow dissolution of community life as young people fled to Amsterdam and beyond.
The game-changer came in 2013 when Microsoft representatives arrived, interested in creating a data center in the Agriport A7 hub, which combined greenhouse agriculture with industrial logistics. They were attracted by the development’s perfect troika: cheap land, robust power capacity, and high-speed fiber optic connections, all within striking distance of Amsterdam’s financial and tech ecosystem. Local officials saw a potential economic savior, while Microsoft saw an optimal digital infrastructure.
Operations officially began in 2015. Now, after several expansion phases, 13 massive main buildings and four smaller structures dominate the landscape. Google also owns a data center in Agriport A7, which became operational in 2020.
As in Mischii, local authorities in North Holland emphasized the tax benefits of hosting data centers. According to Robert Leever, the alderman for Economy and Broad Prosperity, the facilities generate €1.75 million annually for the municipality. “This comes from property taxes,” Leever explains. “It helps lower taxes for other residents. So, it’s a benefit — just not a clearly visible one.” Officials declined a request for official documentation.
The employment rate matches Mischii’s unfulfilled promises: In 2020, Agriport A7 business park projected that these data centers would generate between 1,500 and 2,000 full-time jobs — nearly four times what materialized. As of early 2022, North Holland Municipality stated that Google and Microsoft data centers employed just 530 full-time workers — around 400 at Microsoft (265 direct employees plus 135 security personnel) and 130 at Google. By comparison, in 2021, greenhouse horticulture operations at Agriport A7 employed 2,450 full-time workers — almost five times the data center workforce.
Rural Limitations Are Not To Blame
The data center industry has successfully spread the narrative that data centers bring economic growth and create wealth, not only in parts of Romania and the Netherlands that face economic challenges but also in the financial capital of Europe’s largest economy: Frankfurt.
The data center industry has grown by only 0.1% in Germany over the past five years. The German government itself has repeatedly flagged the digitalization lag as one of the key structural barriers to economic growth. Alongside the promise of economic revival, the industry positioned data centers as catalysts for accelerating Germany’s digitalization.
In 2024, Frankfurt, Germany’s fifth-most populous city, attracted $5.2 billion in foreign direct investment (FDI) — 4.4 times more than any other German city – mainly due to data center investment. However, a Frankfurt city civil servant working closely with the data center industry questions whether these large investments translate to proportionate taxes for the city or job creations – two main avenues that transfer wealth into the local economy.
“Unlike traditional buildings like warehouses, factories, or offices, they do not serve local economies, but rather are part of a global infrastructure that is operated remotely and most often creates value far from where they are built,” explains Max Schulze, who analyzed the economics of data centers in a study commissioned by Germany’s federal economic ministry. Most of the investments are spent on procuring ICT equipment and constructing the buildings, offering limited benefits to the local economy.
The business model behind data centers differs significantly from traditional German industries, which typically generate substantial economic turnover and employment from large investments and heavy electricity use. A misunderstanding of data centers as “traditional” industry projects might explain why many local communities initially welcome them.
Schulze also disputes another key argument made by policymakers — mirroring the industry’s talking points — that data centers would accelerate Germany’s digitalization. “Despite claims by the providers, they do not result in stronger digital economies or accelerate digitalization in a region,” Schulze says.
“They promised jobs, innovation, digital hubs — but after ten years, we have no Silicon Valley here. We just have noise and concrete,” one of the residents living in the neighborhood adjacent to one of the biggest data center clusters in Frankfurt shared.
Data Centers Take Drinking Water and Increase Prices – Where Are the Protests?
A single large-scale data center can consume as much electricity as a small city with a population of around 50,000 people and requires millions of liters of water for cooling. As data centers occupy a significant amount of land, they are often built in agricultural or green landscapes. This high-margin business model directly enriches large tech companies while draining critical resources from local communities.
Germany offers access to three critical resources — water, land, and electricity — that are often scarce elsewhere. As an industrial powerhouse, Germany also has rules and regulations that enable effective resource distribution, supporting the development of new industries such as data centers.
Despite this, all stakeholders noted that access to the electricity supply is becoming a major issue for data centers. In 2022, data centers accounted for about 30% of Frankfurt’s total electricity consumption, according to the city’s Climate Department. The numbers shared by the city’s Climate Department also show that their electricity consumption is more than that of all other industries combined.
“The situation is generally tense,” said NRM Netzdienste Rhein-Main GmbH (NRM), one of Frankfurt’s two electricity distribution operators. “The current demand significantly exceeds the available supply in our Frankfurt grid.”
The International Energy Agency reported that new data centers in Germany face wait times of over seven years to connect to the grid — one of the longest delays in the world. Béla Waldhauser, a veteran industry executive from Frankfurt, highlighted that, in addition to the grid capacity issues, bureaucracy makes the waiting time about five to ten years in Frankfurt.
The Frankfurt City Economic Development team shared that the local energy provider began upgrading grid infrastructure in 2023/2024, investing over 750 million euros. Meanwhile, the coalition agreement of the German federal government proposes to grant special electricity prices to this power-hungry industry.
In Romania’s Mischii commune, ClusterPower’s data center received an exemption from environmental permit requirements despite documentation that revealed staggering resource demands. The company’s Technical Memo “Placement of Cogeneration Units, Chillers” outlines plans for annual water consumption of around 50 million liters, drawn from wells on company property. This volume equals the yearly drinking water needs of around 70,000 people consuming two liters daily.
This “should immediately raise questions about the authorities’ decision to classify this project as one with negligible environmental impact,” emphasizes Alin Tanase, a Greenpeace Romania Climate and Energy Campaigner. So far, local opposition has been absent, likely due to the fact that the data center is not fully operational yet.
In contrast, the community around the Agriport A7 data centers in the Netherlands, located in the Wieringermeer polder, has already felt the strain of excessive water consumption — and responded with organized resistance.
Internal documents accessed by a local Dutch news outlet show how local authorities underestimated Microsoft facilities’ water demands. In 2019, they projected water requirements at 525 cubic meters per hour — roughly 46 million liters annually. But by early 2020, a civil servant acknowledged in internal communications that the estimate was far too low: “With future developments, we can reach 5 million cubic meters per year. But it would be good if we took the double into account.” This means that the predicted need could reach up to 100 million liters annually. In Frankfurt, two city civil servants suggested that they failed to properly estimate the electricity needs when planning data center clusters.
In North Holland, concerned residents, including farmers, then started pushing back on what they perceived as an unsustainable assault on local resources. In early 2021, the Dutch Agriculture and Horticulture Organization (LTO), representing area farmers, appealed Microsoft’s environmental permit for a second data center, arguing that local authorities granted permits “without clear frameworks” for key issues like water consumption. Despite this opposition, Microsoft’s facility was initially built under a “tolerance decision” — a temporary approval allowing construction to proceed despite regulatory irregularities — and later received full permits.
In 2021, a year of severe drought and water shortages, it was revealed that Microsoft’s existing data center in Agriport A7 had consumed 84 million liters of water only that year.
“We could tell people not to use water for agricultural purposes or their lawn, but drinking water is cut last, so we couldn’t control the data centers’ usage,” explained Fabian Zoon, a former local councilman, who opposed the data center’s resource consumption. An additional problem, explains Lilian Peters, a former local councilor and alderman, is that “the citizens pay PWN, the public water utility serving North Holland province, “to clean the water.” “In fact, we are paying for the water used by the data centers,” she stresses.
Under mounting pressure from the local community, Microsoft has begun transitioning from drinking water to rainwater for cooling operations. However, this has brought new environmental challenges: Chemical treatment of rainwater creates brine, discharge water with high salt content. In 2023, environmental group Water Natuurlijk raised concerns over potentially elevated salt levels in the data centers’ wastewater. Local water authorities dismissed these worries, stating that “these discharges have no effect on salinization” and that the water flows into ditches “that do not fall under the freshwater supply.”
In Germany, the Federal Land Utilization Ordinance (BauNVO), which governs urban development and zoning, may have played a key role in preventing conflicts between the data center industry and local communities by establishing specific zoning for industrial infrastructure, such as data centers.
Following the initiative, the city of Frankfurt took an additional step in 2022 and introduced the Commercial Space Development Program to limit the construction of data centers to three major clusters in Frankfurt.
Residents of Seckbach — a mixed residential-industrial area in Frankfurt’s northeast— strongly opposed the move, drawing attention from both city authorities and the data center companies. “We had small factories, small shops, green spaces. Now it’s overwhelming,” says Ingo Stürmer, a Seckbach resident, while pointing toward a gigantic data center visible from his front door.
Concerned residents formed the civic group Wir Wohnen Hier (“We Live Here”) to voice their opposition. It remains one of the few vocal sources of resistance in a city that has otherwise largely welcomed the industry.
“Do we fulfill every wish? No. But we go beyond what’s required by the law,” says Jens-Peter Feidner, country leader of Equinix, the largest data center company in the area. Residents remain skeptical. “We fought and achieved small victories — a few trees, a bit of green on the walls. But you can’t greenwash a mountain of concrete,” one notes.
Land for Big Tech, Not Rural Communities
Besides extensively consuming communities’ drinking water and electricity, data centers occupy land. In Italy, this is a total area of 333,341 square meters, the equivalent of about 47 football fields. Lombardy, a northern Italian region bordering with Switzerland, is one of the main European areas suffering under this encroachment, while already dealing with the highest artificial land consumption, which refers to the loss of natural or semi-natural land, like agricultural or forest land, to urban or other artificial development. The continuous construction of data centers on green land makes the problem worse.
“We don’t have a national regulation against land consumption,” says Paolo Pileri, a professor at the Politecnico di Milano, noting that regions must manage it independently. This unchecked development, adds professor Roberto Comolli, “threatens vital ecosystem services” by raising the risk of heat, floods, and landslides.
Since 2014, Lombardy has regulated land consumption and soil protection, but the implementation has only just begun a decade later. Municipalities are now required to reduce the percentage of land designated as buildable. Yet, many data center projects are still being proposed on greenfield sites, often looking for the last chance to avoid the new restrictions. “Buildable land will become increasingly scarce,” said Renato Bertoglio, a member of the NGO Legambiente Pavia.
There’s no national law defining the authorization process, and current regulations give too much discretion to local authorities. To address this accountability gap, Lombardy has introduced guidelines for data center construction, but they are non-binding, meaning no penalties ensue if ignored. In Italy, an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) can be required based on factors such as energy or water consumption and land use to evaluate the environmental and health impact of projects, including data centers.
However, data center operators often skip the EIA process, according to Paola Brambilla, chair of the EIA subcommittee. Both the Ministry of the Environment and regional Lombardy departments encourage using brownfield sites, areas that were previously used for industry or other development, instead of green spaces. This is often disregarded.
In this murky regulatory environment, local communities are often the only advocates for environmental responsibility. Typically, a company targets greenfield land, local authorities back the project for economic benefits, the land-use plan is amended, and residents protest to protect green spaces, oftentimes only to be ignored.
Big tech companies have already set foot in Bornasco, a small municipality in Lombardy’s province of Pavia of around 2,600 residents. Microsoft is currently building a data center there. The local administration has approved the building of a second one near the town, which covers just 12 square kilometers. Valtidone Logistic Development, the lead of the project, proposed building a logistics hub on the same greenfield land in 2024. After the dismissal of the proposal, it was assessing EIA requirements for a data center instead.
Opponents argue that the project would exacerbate over-development in a town already burdened by several major infrastructure projects, including other data centers and logistics hubs that have gradually spread across the province’s territory over the past few years. They criticize the speed and lack of thorough evaluation in the approval process, especially given the area’s congestion and the potential loss of natural land. “Some citizens of Bornasco, including myself, have submitted 18 observations on the land development plan,” says architect Giovanni Zuntini.
Despite these concerns, the municipality approved the zoning plan for Valtidone’s data center in March this year, dismissing 17 of the 18 objections forwarded by Zuntini and the local community. He emphasized how the data center project was presented in a vague manner, in his opinion, to avoid being subjected to an EIA, a process that had previously led the same company to abandon its plans for a logistics hub.
Transparency and Regulation Gaps in the EU
In light of this development across Europe, EU policymakers rolled out the Energy Efficiency Directive (EED), the first comprehensive reporting framework for data centers, which aims to bring transparency to the sector’s energy consumption.
The directive requires facilities with a power capacity of at least 500 kilowatts to disclose key metrics annually, including the total energy consumption, efficiency rates, temperature settings, waste heat utilization, water usage, and renewable energy adoption.
Critics note that while the reporting requirements mark a step forward in addressing data centers’ environmental impact, the absence of binding reduction targets raises questions about the directive’s effectiveness. “There are no energy targets for data centers, and that’s a problem of accountability and general reduction of emissions,” stresses climate policy expert Kai Ebert.
There remain some troubling transparency gaps. In Microsoft data center reports from 2024, crucial information like renewable energy consumption is mysteriously labeled as “confidential“, and other required data fields – like water input and total energy consumption – are simply left blank.
Enforcement remains toothless. Andrew van der Haar of the Dutch Data Center Association revealed that regulators are taking a soft approach: “For the first three years, they are not going to give any penalties. Instead, they really want to work on the quality of the reporting, rather than penalizing companies for not reporting correctly.”
In 2023, the German federal government enacted the Energy Efficiency Act (Energieeffizienzgesetz, EnEfG), which introduced stringent requirements for data centers. However, the newly formed coalition government, comprising the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Social Democrats (SPD), has indicated intentions to revisit this legislation. While specific amendments to the act have not been detailed, the government’s focus appears to be on promoting data center expansion, potentially reassessing existing regulatory obligations to balance environmental goals with economic and technological growth.
For the communities living in the shadows of these digital fortresses, the crucial question remains: Will Europe’s sustainability ambitions translate into tangible improvements in their daily lives, or merely serve as window dressing for unchecked data center expansion?
