BRUSSELS — The European Union’s energy chief says companies that want to profit off the artificial intelligence boom are welcome in Europe — but only if they demonstrate they are committed to the bloc’s energy, climate and environmental goals.
That means supporting renewable and nuclear power sources rather than fossil fuels, and recycling the amounts of excess heat from data centers to heat Europeans’ homes and businesses, EU Energy Commissioner Dan Jørgensen told POLITICO in an interview.
The AI boom is creating enormous demand for new data centers, with the U.S. and China leading construction of the facilities needed for powering large language models like ChatGPT, Claude and China’s Doubau. The EU wants to catch up.
But these centers require huge amounts of electricity to power them and water to cool them. The burden this places on energy networks and the environment has made the boom controversial, especially in Europe, which has much stricter green rules than the U.S. or China.
