Most countries only allow dangerous industrial facilities on their territory under three conditions: that extreme safety measures be taken, as has been the case in Europe since 1986 with “Seveso” factories—named after a terrible disaster in Italy six years earlier; that their use be limited to the production of irreplaceable goods, which is not always the case; and that the necessary research be conducted to do without them, which is even less the case.
Forty years later, a threat far more destructive in the long term is spreading across the world, without any regulator having yet dared to define its contours: digital data centers. Over the past decade, the explosion of generative artificial intelligence, metaverses, streaming, 5G, and digital twins has caused the demand for computing capacity to double every two years. To meet this demand, the largest machines ever built on Earth are being constructed amid near-universal indifference. According to various projections, there could be between 40,000 and 60,000 data centers worldwide by 2045, covering 300 to 400 million hectares.
These structures are not mere buildings. They are thermodynamic systems designed to consume energy, dissipate most of it as heat, and draw water from aquifers and rivers to cool themselves.
First, water: a medium-sized data center consumes the equivalent of the daily water usage of a city of 50,000 people. Globally, all data centers consumed approximately 200 billion liters of freshwater in 2022. Microsoft reported that its Irish data centers alone consume enough water to empty a medium-sized lake every year. In France, according to ADEME, French data centers are primarily located in areas already facing significant water stress, particularly the Seine Valley, Brittany, and Occitanie—in direct contradiction to the objectives of the Water Plan.
Then there is heat: A study by the University of Oxford measured temperature increases of 1.2 to 3.8 degrees within a 5-kilometer radius of data center clusters in Northern Virginia, Singapore, and the Dublin region. The University of Cambridge has demonstrated that, if current growth continues, global data centers will emit more heat in 2035 than all global air traffic combined.
And then there is biodiversity: the concrete slab of a data center neutralizes dozens of hectares of living soil and its microbial fauna;
and every square meter of paved ground represents a net loss of 1.3 kg of annual carbon sequestration, a 60% reduction in local water retention capacity, and the loss of 80 to 95% of soil biodiversity within ten years.
Added to this is soil contamination: electrical infrastructure, high-voltage transformers, underground cable networks, and cooling systems contaminate the soil and groundwater with heat transfer fluids, transformer oils, and volatile organic compounds.
And then there is noise pollution: backup generators, water-cooling systems, and industrial fans running continuously emit noise levels equivalent to those of a highway during peak traffic.
Finally, the total carbon footprint of the digital sector (manufacturing, transportation, data centers, and end-of-life equipment) is enormous: a single training session for a model like GPT-4 emits as much CO₂ as five mid-sized cars over their entire lifetimes; targeted digital ads alone account for between 8 and 12% of data centers’ energy consumption. Cryptocurrencies, starting with Bitcoin, already consume more electricity than the entire country of Argentina. The digital sector, including data centers, will account for 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions by 2040, according to the University of Lancaster; digital technology will then be the world’s third-largest emitter, behind energy and transportation, and ahead of agriculture.
Yet many of these data centers are unnecessary: according to a study by the Shift Project Institute published in 2023, 30 to 40% of global internet traffic is used for streaming ultra-high-definition video on screens that cannot distinguish the difference from HD.
We could meet all genuinely useful digital needs—that is, those essential to daily life (health, education, science, food, agriculture, recycling, personal communication, public services, democracy, culture, defense)—with less than half the data centers currently in operation or under construction.
We therefore need, first at the European level, a “Digital Seveso” directive. It should include at least seven components:
1) A mandatory, up-to-date registry of all data centers exceeding a certain energy consumption threshold (say, 1 MW), with immediate publication of real-time data on water and energy consumption, carbon footprint, and the nature of their users.
2) A tax on water consumption exceeding a conservation threshold, the proceeds of which would be allocated to the restoration of degraded aquatic environments.
3) A ban on the construction of new data centers in areas of high water stress or on agricultural land of high agroecological value.
4) A requirement for any data center whose thermal output exceeds 500 kW to feed it back into the district heating network or to agricultural greenhouses.
5) A mandatory impact assessment for all AI models, similar to the mandatory environmental impact assessments for major industrial projects.
6) Ensuring that countries in the Global South receive their fair share of the world’s data centers.
7) Using them only for activities explicitly beneficial to the economy of life.
Some will argue that these measures will only hinder Europe, to the detriment of its competitors. That is false. These measures do not mean halting the digital revolution, which is so vital to our well-being; nor do they mean closing data centers; they simply mean imposing on them the same constraints we have imposed for decades on the chemical industry, the automotive industry, and, to a lesser extent, the oil industry.
We will get there. Let us not be the last to demand it.