Climate Goals Be Gone: Data Center Lobbyists Hard-Drilling Their Way Through EU Environmental Laws

Jun 21, 2026

The European AI Action Plan boasts the ambitious goal of tripling data center power capacity in roughly five years—a target that could clash with the actual capabilities of today’s electric grid. This limitation has become the focal point of international political clashes, with various nations vigorously debating which direction to take in building new power plants. Meanwhile, the sector’s lobby is pressuring institutions to set aside predetermined environmental objectives to focus exclusively on data center development.

The European Union, like other major global powers, sees cloud computing, big data, and artificial intelligence as the future of economy, work, security, and Defense. These digital resources often intertwine with one another but all rest on infrastructures that, with the progressive evolution of technology, require an increasingly large amount of energy resources. To understand how electricity demand is evolving, financial consulting firm S&P Global estimates that European data center energy demand will double by 2030. In response to this phenomenon, the influence of the European Nuclear Alliance is growing at the same pace, an organization that Italy also officially joined last year.

According to the European Data Center Association (EUDCA) lobby, neither the renewed interest in nuclear power nor that in renewables will allow Europe to meet the urgency of energy production and distribution. Or, to be precise, the group doubts that the interventions planned to meet demand will be completed within the established timelines. “Every good idea is currently hampered by the certainty, on paper, that everything will move within the predicted timelines,” lamented Lex Coors, president of EUDCA, according to Politico.

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continua qui: https://italiantimes.substack.com/p/climate-goals-be-gone-data-center