COPENHAGEN — The European Union must ensure tech companies disclose the ecological footprint of their data centers, the head of the bloc’s environment agency says.
As Europe races to catch up with China and the United States in the artificial intelligence race, Brussels hopes to put the necessary computing power in place with a threefold increase in data center capacity within seven years.
That goal has raised sustainability concerns, given the large amounts of energy and water required to run this infrastructure.
The European Environment Agency, a Copenhagen-based body providing independent information on sustainability issues to policymakers, worries that the data center boom will threaten the EU’s green goals. It warned that “the rapid expansion of AI presents a growing challenge to achieving climate neutrality” in a paper earlier this month.
