Campaigners Stage Two Days of Protest Against Data Centres Across 13 European Countries

The Stop Dirty Data Centres campaign lists about 67 events on November 6 and 7 in some 55 towns and cities across 13 countries, including Amsterdam, Berlin, Dublin, London, Madrid, Paris, Warsaw, Barcelona, Helsinki and Zagreb, according to the campaign's website. About 106 organisations are listed as supporters, from residents' groups and Friends of the Earth affiliates to university groups, unions, Greenpeace branches and local branches of political parties. The countries also include Austria, Croatia, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Poland, Switzerland and Ireland, with events in Scotland and Northern Ireland as well as England.

The campaign's main demand is blunt. "We're calling for an immediate moratorium on large data centres in Europe!" the site says. Local groups are pressing narrower goals: clearer regulation protecting residents, water and the environment in Poland, stricter climate rules in Germany's energy efficiency law, impact assessments and public debate before further approvals in Nottinghamshire, the refusal of expansion plans in Coleraine in Northern Ireland, and limits on water use in Scotland.

For operators and their tenants, the protests add a European front to resistance that is already reshaping plans in the United States, where data centres became a campaign issue in this week's midterm elections. OpenAI on Friday promised to pay for the power used by its US sites and to drop non-disclosure agreements with local officials after the backlash, and Meta's president said this week that the results would make data centres harder to build.

France and Britain

France has about a dozen events, including in Paris, Grenoble and Marseille, according to the French site AlloForfait. In Paris the group Data for Good is staging a public debate on AI under the title "Data centers partout, démocratie nulle part !" (data centres everywhere, democracy nowhere). The Collectif Stop Campus IA is campaigning against a planned data centre park on farmland in Seine-et-Marne, east of Paris, and residents in Brebières and Corbehem in northern France are marching against a planned data centre and an electrical substation for grid operator RTE. The French organisers argue that data centres take green space, bring little to local economies and create few jobs, and that building the hardware depends on polluting extraction of critical minerals.

In England, the No Leeds Datacentre group was due to march on Friday against Microsoft's data centre plans for the city, the Yorkshire Evening Post reported, describing the effort as part of a wider movement of about 80 action groups across Europe. That figure is lower than the number of supporting organisations now listed on the campaign's own site.

The UK arm of the campaign, coordinated by the charity Global Action Plan, held its first days of action on February 27 and 28, with a protest outside the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero in Westminster, a march through central London and local events in places such as Iver in Buckinghamshire and North Ockenden in east London, where residents oppose a proposed 600MW site. Global Action Plan's community campaigns manager, Owen Espley, called those protests "the first visible sign of a growing movement" questioning hyperscale AI data centres.

Pressure on Regulators

The UK campaign is backing a petition for a moratorium on large data centres, and Energy Secretary Ed Miliband has described their effect on net zero as "inherently uncertain", according to Global Action Plan. Campaigners have used that admission to challenge the government's fast-tracking of planning approvals for the sites.

The campaign lists further events on November 8, 11, 13, 14 and 15, suggesting the action will run beyond the weekend in some places.