30.09.2026
Data Centre Silence
How EU leaders sided with Big Tech over the public’s right to know about the true scale and environmental impact of the AI build-out, forcing a legal challenge to seek disclosure
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METHODOLOGY
Why we made a legal filing to the Aarhus Convention Compliance Committee
INVESTIGATION
METHODOLOGY
Officials are holding key environmental impact figures for all AI data centres across Europe. They won’t let the public see them.
September 30, 2026
The European Commission is withholding vital environmental information from the public, undermining citizens’ ability to participate meaningfully in one of the most critical environmental issues of our time: the enormous and accelerating data centre build-out.
The long awaited rating scheme, now published, offers the appearance of transparency. While the Commission claims it is “the most comprehensive worldwide” transparency initiative around the environmental impact of data centres, it fails to provide the information that communities are entitled to. Absent are the real figures that the Commission holds on how much strain each data centre imposes on the electrical grid, how much water it uses and how much waste heat it emits. In their place are labels corresponding to “efficiency ratios” that conceal more than they reveal. This leaves the industry able to engage in a phoney war against the ratings scheme, which contains most of the carve outs and evasions they have lobbied for, while depriving the public of its right to know.
The Aarhus Convention guarantees the rights of access to information, public participation in decision-making, and access to justice in environmental matters. The European Commission’s stance on data centre labels and the database they are drawn from means that it is currently, both in its lawmaking and its application of the law, in breach of these three pillars. Lighthouse Reports is challenging the Commission with a communication to the Aarhus Convention Compliance Committee, the body that reviews whether officials are fulfilling their legal obligations regarding environmental democracy.
The Indicators Before
Since 2023 the Commission has been collecting a Europe-wide set of “sustainability indicators” from data centre operators across the EU. These indicators constitute a unique source of information on CO2 emissions, water intake, heat emissions and other factors. They are critically necessary for citizens to understand the environmental effects of data centres in their neighbourhoods and hold governments accountable for decisions relating to them. The world’s largest tech companies are admitting that the data centre build-out is accelerating their energy consumption and their greenhouse emissions, and taking them further away – not nearer to – their sustainability goals. These indicators are the only source of data showing, on an EU-wide scale, what the facts on the ground look like.
The Commission itself admits it is collecting this data because there is insufficient information available about the impact of data centres on the environment: “Transparency is key,” and without it Europe cannot evaluate or regulate the sustainability of data centres. The indicators will be used to set minimum performance standards for data centres in Europe; standards which are keenly anticipated across the rest of the world.
The Commission has described its new labelling package as comprehensive and transparent. In fact, it omits and obfuscates crucial information as to how the data centre industry – backed by some of the wealthiest companies on the planet – is performing, concealing this data from the public in a manner which impedes participation in decision-making and, ultimately, undermines environmental democracy.
A Political Choice
In October 2025 a technical report ordered by the Commission described “reporting and transparency of energy consumption” as “fundamentally important for a meaningful assessment of sustainability”. It recommended that, while energy consumption and carbon emissions were “the most sensitive metric” according to industry stakeholders, this information should be published. A year later, the Commission has deemed otherwise: instead of these fundamentally important figures, it will showcase ratios that offer no evidence of real-world effects. The October 2025 report called this what it is: a political choice.
The Commission has bowed to confidentiality clauses demanded by the industry, and uses these to argue that underlying consumption and emissions data are commercial secrets. Under the Aarhus Convention, this is unlawful. The Convention states that emissions-related information can never be considered commercially confidential under any circumstances; other information relating to the environment, including policies, legislation, plans and programmes, needs a public interest test before commercial secrecy can be used to justify non-disclosure. The Commission has not performed any such test.
While the new scheme offers an illusion of transparency, the concrete effects of the accelerating data centre build-out remain shrouded in secrecy. These indicators matter, in a way which is local, concrete and specific. Each new data centre impacts a place, a community and an ecosystem, as well as contributing to overall environmental changes. The risks of the current transparency deficit are concrete. Actual environmental harms across all Member States are concealed. Insight into and accountability for decisions about how much environmental impact each data centre should be allowed to have on a location and community, are made without public oversight. Citizens are unable to challenge planning decisions or hold governments to account over legally binding net zero commitment. Other countries, battling with climate change and looking to the EU for guidance on data centre impacts, cannot get a data-driven insight to help them make responsible choices.
In industry forums, where data centre leaders speak among themselves about the future, they refer to ordinary citizens protesting their construction as “cave people”, to policy makers as “nothing but schoolteachers”. The Aarhus Convention guarantees that even schoolteachers have a role to play in guiding policy, and even cave people can hold governments accountable for undermining environmental justice. It is this guarantee that the Commission is breaking at this critical moment.
Read the full document here.
