US Tech Firms Lobby EU for Data Center Emissions Secrecy
An investigation revealed that US tech companies, including Microsoft, successfully lobbied the EU to keep the environmental impact of their datacenters confidential. This led to a secrecy provision in EU rules, written almost verbatim from industry demands, that now shields individual datacentre pollution data from public view. Legal scholars warn this confidentiality clause may violate EU transparency and environmental information access conventions, hindering researchers and the public from scrutinizing the growing energy footprint of AI-driven datacentre expansion.
John Q. Hosedrinker