Brussels to Big Tech: Embrace sustainable AI or go away
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.
Jørgensen said these centers must not push up energy bills or carbon emissions.
“I think the market for AI in Europe will be very big,” he said. “But the companies that are active in Europe in building data centers simply need to adopt the position that being sustainable is for their advantage.”
Brussels is preparing to unveil a new “tech sovereignty” package on Wednesday, aimed at reducing Europe’s dependence on foreign technology providers in sectors such as cloud computing, AI and semiconductors.
The rapid expansion of AI is expected to sharply increase electricity demand across Europe over the coming decade.
“We are looking into a decade where the consumption of energy from data centers in Europe can easily double, maybe even more than that,” Jørgensen said. “And that is a challenge.”
The EU is already grappling with how to supply more clean electricity to power industry and transport and heat homes, activities that currently rely on burning oil and gas directly. The data center boom will complicate that by adding even more demand for clean electricity.
The European Commission is also preparing a new sustainability label for data centers that would rate facilities based on metrics such as energy efficiency, water use and waste heat recovery. But the proposal has already sparked criticism from both industry and EU governments, particularly over draft criteria that appeared to favor renewable electricity while excluding nuclear power.
Jørgensen declined to comment directly on the draft proposal but signaled the Commission was listening to the criticism. “We always reflect technology neutrality,” he said.
Later in the interview, he explicitly described both renewables and nuclear as part of Europe’s clean energy transition. “We very much expect data centers … to support our Green Deal in Europe and transition towards more clean energy, both nuclear and renewables,” he said.
Despite concerns from operators that stricter sustainability requirements could scare away investment, Jørgensen dismissed the idea that Europe’s green agenda and AI ambitions are incompatible.
Power price worries
As governments race to attract investments from tech giants such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google, policymakers are increasingly worried about the energy consequences of the sector’s growth.
Ireland has emerged as one of the early warning signs. Data centers now consume more than 20 percent of the country’s electricity — the highest share per capita in the world — and a report published last week by Beyond Fossil Fuels and Friends of the Earth Ireland argued the boom has already added costs to household electricity bills.
Jørgensen warned that unless the sector becomes more integrated into local energy systems, political backlash could grow. “If they see [sustainability] as a disadvantage, then probably we are at a bad place,” he said.
One of the commissioners’s main concerns is the industry’s limited use of waste heat from servers, which is often released unused into the atmosphere. “If we use just half of the excess waste heat today, we could heat 4 million European homes,” Jørgensen said. “This is, in my view, unacceptable.”
Asked whether AI companies should help build and finance the energy infrastructure needed to power their data centers, Jørgensen said the approach would ultimately depend on national governments.
“This will be very different from member state to member state,” he said. “But there’s no doubt that these huge consumers of energy will also be driving the market, therefore supporting the transition that we want is important.”
The Commission currently has little data available on the energy use of data centers. Earlier reporting by POLITICO showed only 36 percent of data centers required to report energy-efficiency data under EU rules had done so.
“We need more transparency because they are a very important player,” Jørgensen said. “It’s also in their interest to show how well they’re doing and that they can be a part of the solution and not only a problem.”
