Down with Data Centres Developing Critical Policy

In the face of a climate crisis, the current regulation of data centres across Europe seems scattered, often favouring businesses, whack-a-mole and NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) approaches, or simply insufficiently ambitious. Any current efforts to govern data centres miss the mark by neglecting shifts in the business model of the tech industry, that encourage the growth of data centres, and by assuming there is an abundance of natural resources to fuel them in perpetuity. This makes rethinking the policy approach to limit the harms from data centres one of the biggest policy challenges of our age. At Privacy Camp 2024 in Brussels, we hosted a discussion on what a critical policy intervention should look like to ensure environmentally sustainable tech in Europe . This post is a reflection of the discussion, where we summarize the contributions made by our speakers and the discussion held in the break-out sessions between audience members. We also provide several concrete recommendations that arose from the convening. The discussion at Privacy Camp is part of our broader efforts to shift the debate about data centres in the EU. In our ongoing research, we argue for an updated political-economic framework to grasp the driving forces behind hyperscale data centre expansion. Notably, the top three technology companies—AWS, Microsoft, and Google—are cloud giants, highlighting a close link between data centre growth and the shift to the cloud in the broader industry. We also argue that a radical approach to regulating data centres should be one based on the perspective of scarcity of resources, rather than their abundance. Our future is one in which water, fuel, land, and other critical resources that enable data centres to function will become increasingly scarce.