Res 5. Green Data Centres for Europe: Climate-Safe and Sovereign

Introduction

Europe needs its own digital capacity — the foundation of a digitally enabled
society, a competitive economy and a functioning government. Digital capacity
also means the power to shape artificial intelligence itself, rather than
leaving it to Big Tech and authoritarian governments. However, the current data-
centre expansion is pressuring Europe's energy, water and land, while a few US
hyperscalers are dominating the cloud market and seizing the value it creates.
The European Green Party calls for binding rules to keep Europe’s digital
infrastructure within environmental and resource limits, alongside equal
requirements across EU Member States and candidate countries. Transparency, data
protection and democratic oversight must be core principles. Executed correctly,
Europe’s digital infrastructure can become a competitive advantage.

Body

Data centres are among the largest new loads Europe will connect this decade. On
their current path, they risk straining grids, depleting water resources and
generating noise and waste, while their tax revenues and economic benefits often
flow elsewhere. They create relatively few local jobs compared with their energy
demand. Europe needs digital infrastructure, but not at the expense of
communities and ecosystems or by exacerbating water stress or grid constraints.

Across Europe, procedural accelerations and insufficient safeguards are
repeating a familiar pattern. Changes to urban-planning and construction
legislation adopted in June 2026 in North Macedonia ‒ an EU candidate country ‒
have accelerated procedures for data-centre and related energy infrastructure
projects, while key criteria and safeguards remain insufficiently defined. Plans
for a national data centre and a proposed commercial project in Pehčevo have
raised questions about transparency, investment criteria and public
participation. Where communities are confronted with such projects without
information or a say, emergency brakes follow, as moratoria in Scotland and the
Amsterdam region show.

The EU has begun building a framework for transparency and monitoring, but
reporting and non-binding commitments are not enough. Missing are common minimum
requirements, effective monitoring and fair allocation of the costs of
infrastructure and environmental impacts.

Europe does not have to choose between digitalisation and climate: a green data-
centre and AI strategy can set it apart from the United States, which is turning
to gas turbines, and China, where coal still dominates. Its first building block
is flexibility: data centres that shift non-urgent workloads to hours of surplus
wind and solar and use their batteries to support the grid stop competing with
households and industry for scarce grid capacity and can connect sooner –
without making electricity more expensive for everyone else. Its second is
sovereignty: data centres open to foreign authorities do not become European by
sitting on European soil – they must be built, owned and run by Europeans, with
strong data protection and cybersecurity.