Blog 09.07.2025

Value or waste from data centres? It’s time for EU to decide

With the aim to scale up its data centre capacity, how can Europe ensure a good return on investment from data centres, to help its own economic growth, boost R&D and support European companies and software developers to scale, grow and commercialise?

It’s not really about the number of data centres or power of machines. Europe needs to be more strategic than that, asking three critical questions:

How to ensure Europe has the right skills and enough of it?
How can we make a wide impact through the European collaboration?
Where’s the ownership of European data?

People and skills must be in focus

Starting with the human capital. To create value with data centres, we need to have a much deeper and broader understanding about technology, its development, application and implications across all fields, meaning also the capability to apply it to various research and business problems, to create something new.

We need a much better understanding of data and data management skills, the ability to combine data from different fields and to apply it in new ways. This is a bigger issue, requiring structural changes that go beyond EU competences.

In the context of European e-infrastructures, strategic investments in EU-level initiatives like the AI Skills Academies and joint study programmes in AI and data are essential. In general, infrastructures like AI Factories should be recognized as tools for training people, and policies should be aligned across the EU – for example Union of Skills should be implemented in coherence with AI Continent.

Europe needs a unified approach to data and regulation

The second theme, cooperation, is a tricky one. There should be a common European vision bright enough to make structural changes possible, overcoming barriers that hinder the EU Single Market.

European institutions and member states should work together, so that cross-cutting issues like data, wouldn’t end up in separate regulatory tracks. It’s not enough to focus on data or technology itself, but also to think how we need to adjust other regulations and policies, because technology and data affect everything.

There’s a burning need for combining and sharing understanding from different fields and working together towards a common goal, instead of working in silos. This is easier said than done, but maybe starting with small incremental steps could be an approach worth trying? For example, data pooling in the context of the upcoming Bioeconomy Strategy that concerns not only many research and industrial sectors but also many administrative branches? It’s time to recognize that we are dealing with topics that don’t fit into our current structures and there should be courage to invent new structures where people and institutions work together on a broader scale.

Europe must take control of its own data

The ownership of data is a game changer. Currently Europe invests in computing capacity, and EuroHPC is indeed a success story. So we have capacity, but where is all our data and who has control over it? To some extent we know where it is, but to a large extent we don’t.

At the end of the day, data is the asset that creates new information and business value, brings the content to our AI models and makes a difference in how the world works. So it really does matter, where it is and who can create value (or something else) out of it. Shouldn’t Europe take control over its own data?

It’s time to look at the European cloud development as a wider ecosystem that should be developed coherently, building on existing work and initiatives. Efforts in federating existing data infrastructures, such as the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), the common European data spaces, The Open Web Search initiative, and the upcoming AI Factory Data Labs, should be scaled up hand in hand with investments in AI and cloud capabilities, to reap the benefits of data.

The Open Web Search – i.e. an open European web index is a wonderful tool, as it directs openly available internet data for European users, with a market potential of up to €4,5bn within ten years.

Sustainability goals must cover the whole lifecycle of a data center

Coming back to data centres. In addition to processing the perhaps most valuable asset in the world, they also consume vast amounts of energy. Data centres can also have various kinds of implications on the region where they are placed.

Thus, Europe should be very selective in its data centre investments, thinking strategically based on qualitative criteria: How can Europe secure that value from data is created for Europe, and how can it do it in the most cost-efficient and sustainable way?

There’s good measures in the pipeline in the EU’s sustainability rating scheme for data centres, but in my opinion the EU should be even more ambitious and address the sustainability of the whole lifecycle of a data center, starting from construction phase all the way to reuse and recycling at the decommissioning phase. This would really make a difference in reducing emissions.

Data centers should create economic and societal value

Europe could also differentiate with socially responsible data center: what types of data centres deliver actual economic and societal value to Europe, reinforce European data ownership, and mitigate risks of vendor lock-in?

How do data center demonstrate responsibility towards the regions where they are located, do they collaborate with local actors and companies, do they create new talent, jobs and R&D activities? What’s the purpose of a data centre and what does it bring back to the society?

To summarize: Europe has momentum to take leadership in data center sustainability and data economy, with a huge potential societal impact. Now it’s time to join forces, think strategically and invest in peoples’ skills.

Related to the theme, CSC has given feedback to various ongoing EU initiatives, such as the AI and Cloud development act, AI in science strategy, Apply AI strategy and Data union strategy. Feel free to take a look and share your thoughts!