The apps on your phone, the AI tools you use at work, the streaming service running in the background: all of it runs on physical infrastructure consuming a rapidly growing share of national electricity grids. In the Netherlands alone, AI data centers consumed 5,100 gigawatt-hours of electricity in 2024, equivalent to the annual usage of nearly two million households. Fewer than one in four of those facilities has publicly available consumption data.
That gap is not incidental. It reflects a disclosure system that collects information without making it accessible to the people most affected by it.
Required to Report, Rarely Readable
Europe’s data centers are legally required to disclose electricity and water use. The information largely isn’t reaching anyone who needs it.
Under the European Energy Efficiency Directive, data centers with installed IT power demand of at least 500 kilowatts must report energy and water consumption. The framework took shape through the 2023 Directive and the 2024 delegated regulation that set out specific reporting categories and deadlines. A cross-border investigation by Lighthouse Reports and Trouw spent roughly a year pursuing freedom-of-information requests across Europe and found disclosure to be largely absent or inaccessible in practice.
The Netherlands offers a vivid case study. The Dutch Datacenter Association counted 186 qualifying commercial data centers in the country at the end of 2025. The Netherlands Enterprise Agency, known as RVO, had data on only 104 of them. Public electricity figures were available for just 44 facilities; water figures for 47, according to the investigation’s reporting. That is fewer than one in four, in a country home to some of Europe’s most concentrated data-center infrastructure.
The situation resembles a restaurant being legally required to post calorie counts but locking the menu in the kitchen and showing it only to the health inspector. Some of the data exists within government systems. The public just doesn’t get to see it.
What the Incomplete Picture Already Reveals
Dutch data centers consumed 37% more electricity in 2024 than in 2021, and the growth curve is pointing straight up.
Statistics Netherlands reported that data centers accounted for 4.6% of Dutch national electricity consumption in 2024, up from 3.3% in 2021, a 37% increase in three years. Grid operator TenneT projects that figure could reach 10% to 15% by 2030. That projection lands in a country already experiencing grid-capacity constraints that are delaying housing developments and blocking business connections.
RVO data reportedly showed Microsoft’s largest Dutch facility alone accounts for roughly 1% of national electricity consumption, according to the Lighthouse Reports and Trouw investigation. Google operates two large data centers in the Netherlands and does not disclose comparable facility-level figures, according to the same investigation.
European-wide figures, sourced from Politico’s coverage of the investigation and based on incomplete reporting, suggest data centers used approximately 20.7 terawatt-hours of electricity and 8.75 million cubic meters of water across the continent in 2025. Those figures likely represent a lower bound, given the missing facility-level data across multiple countries.
Why the Gaps Actually Matter
The transparency shortfall is not a bureaucratic abstraction. It has concrete consequences for real decisions.
- Grid operators like TenneT need facility-level demand data to plan capacity expansions efficiently.
- Water use at roughly 0.1% of Dutch national consumption sounds modest until a cluster of data centers draws from the same potable-water source during a drought.
- Residents near data centers have limited ability to assess local environmental burdens without public figures.
- Users of AI tools, cloud storage, and streaming services cannot easily evaluate the environmental cost of services they use daily.
The Confidentiality Argument Has Limits
Commercial sensitivity is a real concern. It is not a blank check for near-total opacity.
Operators argue that detailed consumption data reveals commercially sensitive information about workloads, efficiency, and infrastructure. Authorities invoke confidentiality rules. RVO told Trouw it held additional data for some facilities but did not release it, creating a frustrating distinction: the information exists inside a government system, but the public cannot see it. Europe Restricts Microsoft, Amazon, and Google from handling certain sensitive data, yet the opacity around their own infrastructure consumption remains largely unaddressed.
The opacity feels like watching your electricity meter spin while your utility refuses to identify which appliance is running. Electricity and water use genuinely vary across facilities based on cooling design, server efficiency, climate, workload intensity, and renewable-energy sourcing, so direct comparisons between operators are not always straightforward. That complexity is real. It does not justify a situation where fewer than one in four qualifying facilities have any publicly available data at all.
What Credible Improvement Requires
Mandatory public disclosure at the facility level would close the gap that a year of freedom-of-information requests could not.
The corrective path starts with mandatory public disclosure at the facility level, not just reporting to national agencies that hold data without releasing it. Enforcement mechanisms need to close the gap between the 186 facilities the industry counts and the 104 the regulator tracks. Standardized metrics should separate potable water from reclaimed or closed-loop sources, and purchased renewables from standard grid electricity, so that reported figures are actually comparable across operators.
The policy question was never simply how much the sector consumes in aggregate. It is whether the communities bearing the infrastructure costs can measure what they are absorbing.
TenneT’s 10% to 15% projection for 2030 is a near-term planning problem, not a distant concern. Communities absorbing that growth deserve the data to plan for it now.
