It is positive that, finally, a public debate has been opened about the deployment of data centers. In Spain, it has begun as a result of the recent Royal Decree project of the Government on sustainability, efficiency, and sovereignty of data centers. For that alone, it should be welcomed, although the debate has been developing for months, in a much more underground manner, in the digital and energy sectors.
The resources that these infrastructures demand are very significant, particularly in energy terms. So much so that their deployment can condition wholesale electricity prices, network costs, and the need to build new electrical infrastructures.
In the U.S., a pioneer country in the massive development of data centers, their consequences —positive and negative— have been part of the public debate for some time, with intense controversies and a growing citizen opposition in some territories, which has led states and counties to start adopting restrictive measures. The most striking case is New York, where Governor Kathy Hochul established a one-year moratorium on new hyperscale data centers on July 14, precisely while a new regulatory framework is being designed to protect consumers, infrastructures, and the environment.
In Europe, some states had already begun to take measures earlier. The paradigmatic example is Ireland, a country where data centers represented 23% of all national electricity consumption in 2025, according to the Irish statistical office, and where after a four-year moratorium on their construction, a new plan has been approved with strict requirements for them. Similarly, Denmark is now processing a reform to prioritize access to an increasingly scarce network capacity, in which data centers appear among the sectors likely to receive lower priority.
Outside of Europe, countries as different as Australia, Singapore, or Malaysia are also moving towards greater regulation. Australia proposes that data centers provide new renewable generation, firm capacity, and flexibility, avoiding passing their costs onto other consumers. Singapore presented its Digital Infrastructure Bill on September 8, which introduces sustainability requirements for data centers, and Malaysia already conditions new investments on having sufficient energy and water and meeting environmental criteria.
In that same direction, Mario Draghi defended last Friday, September 11, in his article Europe's difficult choices on AI, that Europe needs to substantially expand its own computing capacity if it wants to preserve its sovereignty. But this expansion cannot be done ignoring the restrictions of energy, network, territory, or efficiency.
In the energy sector, therefore, the increase in electricity demand and connection requests caused by data centers may exceed existing capacity and must be ordered. The first problem is deciding to whom we grant a scarce connection: if, for example, a data center obtains the electrical capacity that a steel mill with hundreds of workers needs to electrify and modernize its production, society will likely have difficulty understanding it.
In some places, this problem is already starting to become visible. On September 11, ACER published its opinion on the Portuguese resource adequacy assessment. The Portuguese national analysis detects risks of electrical adequacy from 2028 to 2035 associated, among other factors, with the strong expected increase in demand from large consumers, especially data centers. ACER clarifies that Portugal may be overestimating the deficit because it undervalues possible new investments, batteries, and demand response, but confirms that the problem exists and deserves planning. This warning puts, at a minimum, into perspective the overreaction of some developers to the Spanish Royal Decree project, threatening to move their investments precisely to Portugal.
The second risk is increasing our energy dependence on third countries in a particularly complex geopolitical scenario. If to power European data centers we need to burn a fossil gas that Europe does not possess and must import, we will hardly be gaining sovereignty. On the contrary, we will be losing it.
That is why it makes sense, both environmentally and economically, to demand additional and real renewable energy from new centers. Just as it makes sense to maintain a high requirement in Europe regarding energy efficiency, resource use, storage, flexibility, and reuse, areas in which we also have important European companies. If not everyone can connect, we must prioritize the most sustainable projects and those that add the most value to our economy and our society.
But there is a second dimension of sovereignty, probably even more important. In a very interesting article published on September 2 in the Financial Times, its author, Mehran Gul, raises an essential idea: hosting servers in a country does not equate to having sovereign artificial intelligence capability, as the physical dispersion of hardware does not by itself decentralize technological power.
Obviously, a data center located in Europe and essentially dedicated to operating American models like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini does not necessarily increase our digital sovereignty. A recent policy brief from Bruegel on the European computing capacity gap arrives, with nuances, at a similar conclusion: the European computing deficit is not simply resolved by installing infrastructure; access to networks, permissions, and genuine tools of sovereignty in the use of that capacity are needed.
In fact, the opposite may happen: our technological dependence may jeopardize our autonomy. We have already had a very concrete warning this year. Just go back to June 12, when the U.S. Government imposed export controls that prevented foreign citizens from accessing the new models Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5, whether they were inside or outside the U.S. Anthropic, unable to verify the nationality of each user in real time, had to temporarily suspend access to both models.
Finally, the restrictions on Fable 5 were lifted on June 30 and the service became globally available again on July 1, but it was a rather graphic demonstration that having physical infrastructure on European soil does not mean controlling the services that operate on it. However, there are regulatory tools to reduce that risk and we must implement them. It is not about preventing large international companies from establishing themselves in Europe, but about demanding guarantees so that Europeans can access the services that use our energy, our networks, and our territory on equal terms.
Another way to bet on our sovereignty is to promote a true European space for data and cloud services, with European residence and control. Developers who choose this model should be prioritized. And we should also favor the centers that provide computing capacity to European models —like Mistral— and to the public infrastructures we are building. The Commission already has 19 AI Factories and is promoting new Gigafactories to increase European training and inference capacity.
These are some of the necessary conditions to ensure a sustainable and sovereign deployment of data centers in Europe. Today we are still not meeting them. The intention is to deploy quickly and measure success in installed megawatts, instead of seeking maximum performance in computing capacity per energy power used. Burning imported gas, even behind the grid, at current prices, can hardly be efficient, in addition to being environmentally unsustainable. And sovereignty cannot be discussed if those developments do not offer our European societies greater control over the technology they host.
It is not enough to tell citizens and their representatives that these centers are essential and that they must accept them without more to avoid losing a race whose goal, too often, we have not even defined. But that is another discussion: that of the international governance of artificial intelligence. And it deserves its own article.
about the author:
Nicolás González Casares is a member of the European Parliament for the PSOE and a member of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (S&D).