Big Tech bends EU data-centre law

Hot take: this reads like regulatory capture in plain sight, with a transparency regime flipped into an opacity regime. For AI and cloud infrastructure, that is a bad trade: the sector’s physical footprint keeps growing, but the public loses the data needed to judge where the costs land.

• –The article says Microsoft and DigitalEurope pushed the Commission from aggregated publication to blanket confidentiality for individual data-centre metrics.
• –That hides the numbers communities care about most: per-site electricity use, water consumption, and efficiency performance.
• –Legal experts quoted in the piece argue the clause may clash with EU transparency rules and the Aarhus Convention’s environmental-information guarantees.
• –The Commission’s own figures show weak reporting quality already, so secrecy makes an accountability problem worse, not better.
• –For AI infra planning, this blunts comparisons between operators and makes green claims harder to verify.