Most data centers refusing to say how much water, electricity they use

The vast majority of data centers in Europe keep information about their environmental impact secret, according to a study by Lighthouse Report in collaboration with Trouw and other European media. In the Netherlands, less than a quarter of larger data centers publish data about their electricity and drinking water usage.

The researchers spent a year trying to obtain data on data centers’ environmental impact in Europe, invoking freedom of information laws in various European countries. Their attempts have yielded no results.

The European Energy Efficiency Directive (EED) obliges data centers with an installed capacity of at least 500 kilowatts (kW) to report data including their energy and water consumption. In practice, few do so, despite the directive being in effect for three years.

According to the Dutch Datacenter Association (DDA), there were 186 commercial data centers with a capacity of 500 kW or more in the Netherlands at the end of last year. The Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO), which collects the information for the EU, has data on only 104 of them.

The RVO also lacks crucial data regarding water and energy consumption. Public figures exist on the electricity usage of 44 centers and the water usage of 47 - less than a quarter of the larger Dutch data centers. The RVO told Trouw that it has more data on some centers, but did not provide figures.

Data centers have become increasingly prolific in recent years with the rise of first cloud services and then AI applications. The number of data centers has skyrocketed, and with them the consumption of electricity for operations and drinking water for cooling the thousands of servers involved.

According to the latest figures from Statistics Netherlands (CBS), data centers used 5.1 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in the Netherlands in 2024. That is 4.6 percent of the country’s total electricity consumption, a near doubling in five years. Grid operator TenneT projects that data centers will consume 10 to 15 percent of the Netherlands’ electricity by 2030. That while a lack of grid capacity has businesses, institutions, and even housing developments on waiting lists.

Data from the RVO revealed this summer that Microsoft’s largest data center in the Netherlands alone accounts for 1 percent of the national electricity consumption. Google, which has two large data centers in the Netherlands, does not disclose this information.

Little is known about data centers’ water usage. In the Netherlands, it is estimated that they account for about 0.1 percent of total consumption. That is a small proportion, but climate change is making conservative water usage increasingly critical with prolonged periods of drought and water shortages.