GoKawiilMicrosoft and DigitalEurope, a lobby group whose members include Amazon, Google and Meta, secured a secrecy provision in EU law to block public access to critical information on data centres’ environmental impact, Investigate Europe can reveal.
With the EU set to triple its data centre capacity in the next five years, the European Commission started collecting key metrics like energy efficiency and water consumption from facilities. However, information on individual facilities’ footprint is kept secret, after industry pushed to amend the 2024 legislation to classify it as confidential and commercially sensitive .
The confidentiality clause could violate EU transparency rules, 10 leading legal scholars told Investigate Europe. In particular, it could infringe the bloc’s obligations under the Aarhus Convention, an international treaty on access to environmental information, they warned.
"In two decades, I cannot recall a comparable case," said Professor Jerzy Jendrośka, who spent 19 years on the body overseeing the Aarhus Convention and teaches environmental law at Opole University in Poland. "This clearly seems not to be in line with the convention."
EU member states were also encouraged to refuse public requests for the information, Investigate Europe can reveal. In an email sent in early 2025 and shared with Investigate Europe, a senior Commission figure stressed to national authorities that they were “obliged to keep confidential all information and key performance indicators for individual data centres.”
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