Sloweb\u2019s position on data centres. 14 September 2026, updated 22 September 2026.
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Pietro Jarre, Mauro Munzi<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sloweb was founded in 2017 to stand up for a digital world that is lean, clean and fair: lean in the resources it demands from the planet, clean in the way it treats people\u2019s data, fair in the way it distributes costs and benefits. It is also the yardstick by which we read infrastructure, and in data centres all three terms apply at once: the energy and the water they consume, the data they accumulate, and the bill they leave to local communities and to everyone\u2019s energy bills.
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In Italy, by mid 2026, data centre operators had filed 520 requests for new connections with Terna, the company that runs the national electricity transmission grid, for 96 gigawatts of capacity on top of what is already connected. The roughly two hundred data centres now in operation draw 0.6 gigawatts: the capacity being requested is one hundred and sixty times the capacity installed. Terna itself considers only 1.5 to 2 additional gigawatts genuinely achievable by 2030, which is between two and a half and three times what is running today, and little more than two per cent of what has been requested.
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That figure is not the problem but a symptom, and at the same time a decoy: filing a connection request costs little, so operators submit it for several sites, take a place in the queue and decide later, once the permits have arrived and the capital has been raised. Treating the 96 gigawatts as a forecast of consumption therefore means arguing about the wrong number.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Of all the figures needed to assess the real environmental, social and economic impact of this wave, in truth very few are known. There is no public data, facility by facility, on expected electricity consumption and water withdrawal; nobody knows how much waste heat is dispersed and how much is recovered; nobody knows how many people will work at the facilities once construction is over; nobody knows what share of the grid reinforcement will end up in the electricity tariffs that everyone pays. The site sign planted at the corner of a field shows the surface area and the name of the developer, and no rule requires it to say anything more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On 21 September 2026 the European Commission adopted the delegated regulation establishing the sustainability label for data centres (1). From 15 August 2027 every facility above 500 kilowatts of power dedicated to IT equipment will receive, each year, a label generated by the European database, with two classes from A to G: one for energy, calculated on the PUE (the ratio between the consumption of the whole facility and that of the IT equipment alone), and one for the freshwater withdrawn. The label also shows the breakdown of energy by source, whether the facility offers flexibility to the grid (that is, whether it is prepared to shift or reduce its consumption when the grid requires it) and whether it is equipped to supply its waste heat.
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(1) European Commission, Delegated Regulation C(2026) 3472 final of 21 September 2026, supplementing Directive (EU) 2023\/1791 and amending Delegated Regulation (EU) 2024\/1364 as regards the establishment of a common Union rating scheme for data centres, transmitted to the Council with documents 13444\/26 and 13444\/26 ADD 1: Articles 3, 4, 5 and 6, Annexes I, II and III.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n The label says more than the site sign, and less than the meter we call for further on. Article 5 of the regulation provides that all the data on individual facilities reported to the database remain confidential, except those that appear on the label, and classifies them as information whose disclosure would undermine the commercial interests of operators, which is the ground on which the European rules on access to documents and to environmental information allow a request to be refused. What appears on the label are ratios and percentages. The database knows each facility\u2019s electricity consumption in kilowatt hours and its water withdrawal, while citizens and local authorities will see them only as totals for each Member State and for the Union as a whole. The figures are declared by the operators themselves, with estimates where recognised measurements are lacking. The regulation gives Member States the option of checking them, and verification by a third party appears only among the hypotheses to be assessed at the 2028 review. Facilities not yet in operation can obtain the label on design values, and therefore before a single server has been switched on. Data centres serving the defence and civil protection of a Member State are exempt from reporting any data at all, and the text does not say who is to establish that they actually serve that purpose. The reasons for this race can be found in the accounts of the large technology companies. Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon have announced capital expenditure of 725 billion dollars for 2026, 77 per cent more than the 410 billion of 2025. No company ties up sums of that order to sell a service at a price set in a competitive market: it ties them up to occupy a position where monopoly rent is assured. The business model of the AI labs consists in selling predictions of behaviour, which is what artificial intelligence in the end produces. Producing those predictions requires recorded data that can be resold and accumulated, and requires it in growing quantities. Data centres are the place where that accumulation happens, and at the same time the tollbooth that collects the toll: the owner of the facility and the big tech company running its models there take a cut on everything that passes through, and the mass of data already accumulated makes competition impracticable. The problem, then, is not the figure but the fact that this race is taking place without planning, whether European or national, and with rules written downstream, at the end of the process. The decisions taken so far concern procedures. The so called bills decree (decreto bollette), converted into law in 2026, introduced a single authorisation procedure to be concluded within ten months. On 24 February 2026 the Chamber of Deputies approved the enabling law on data centres, with 243 votes in favour, none against and six abstentions, and the text is now before the Senate: the law declares data centre projects to be of national interest and shortens the authorisation procedures. On 3 June 2026 the Lombardy Region approved Regional Law no. 11, which classifies facilities above 5 megawatts as productive settlements, gives those above 10 megawatts supra municipal relevance and rewards the reuse of disused sites. These are regional rules and procedural rules, and none of them establishes how much power the country intends to allocate to this use, in which areas, on what timetable and in the service of which users: there is no planning, and no judgement on what the national interest actually is. The question of whom this capacity is for is not a detail, because a gigawatt devoted to the services of the public administration, to health care, to schools and to the Italian businesses that need it is not the same thing as a gigawatt devoted to selling computing capacity to customers on another continent. Without an industrial strategy that tells the two cases apart, the connection queue takes the place of industrial policy, and it decides by the crudest of criteria, whereby whoever arrives first takes the energy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The way this race is proceeding runs over principles that Europe and Italy have built up over decades, and that apply to anyone else who builds something weighing on public resources.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A company that opens a waste treatment plant provides a financial guarantee in favour of the Region, and for landfills the guarantee also covers the period after closure, as laid down by Article 208 of Legislative Decree 152 of 2006 and Article 14 of Legislative Decree 36 of 2003. The owner of a renewable energy plant must guarantee the restoration of the site at the end of its life, and the guarantee is provided before work begins, as laid down by Article 12 of Legislative Decree 387 of 2003 and by the guidelines of the Ministerial Decree of 10 September 2010. For quarries, regional laws require the same, and this is one example among many. A data centre of one hundred thousand square metres, which at the end of its life may remain an empty shed on sealed soil, today falls under none of these rules.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The same gap appears in the environmental impact assessment, which for data centres runs on half the ordinary timescale; in land take, where the reuse of already compromised sites remains a rewarded priority rather than an obligation; and in grid costs, which no rule places on the developer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On the ground, the bill can be read in the figures the government itself publishes. On 4 August 2026 the Ministry of Enterprises and Made in Italy recognised as strategic two programmes worth 6.8 billion euros in total, to which it attributes more than 3,900 jobs, direct and indirect. The larger of the two is the campus of K2 Strategic Infrastructure Italy at Zibido San Giacomo and Lacchiarella, two municipalities in the Metropolitan City of Milan: 5.3 billion of investment, around 2,000 workers a year during the four years of construction and, once in operation, 200 direct and 1,300 indirect jobs. A facility worth 5.3 billion that permanently employs two hundred people has the capital to labour ratio of a power station, not of a manufacturing plant. Land, on the other hand, is consumed straight away. In the triangle between Lacchiarella, Siziano and Zibido the facilities already occupy 700,000 square metres; the campus that Apto has announced at Lacchiarella adds another 228,000, and the one at Bornasco, in the province of Pavia, a further 165,000. The Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli puts at 120 hectares the farmland absorbed by the new projects alone. Disused industrial sites could accommodate a demand even much larger than the one now settling on the fields, but those soils, and the aquifers beneath them, are often contaminated, and remediation is costly and above all takes a very uncertain time to complete; those costs should be placed on whoever proposes the facility, instead of being left to the community. Where water is concerned, the word consumption covers three different cases. A facility may withdraw water and return it to the aquifer or to the riverbed as the law prescribes; it may cool itself with a closed circuit, which once filled consumes nothing more; or it may dissipate its heat by evaporating water into the atmosphere, in which case the water is actually consumed. Antonio Baldassarra, chief executive of Seeweb, calculates that dissipating 0.6 megawatts by evaporation takes a thousand litres an hour, which comes to 14.6 million litres a year for every megawatt installed, and points out that a data centre dissipates as heat almost all the electricity it consumes, so that the water account is no secondary matter beside the energy account. In August 2026 the Po River Basin Authority declared a high water scarcity alert, in Lomellina water for the rice fields was distributed in turns, and Confagricoltura Pavia estimated the losses of the sector at over 100 million euros: this is the same province in which the Bornasco data centre is being built. A licence to draw water that will never be returned, granted to a computing facility, cannot cost the same as one for agricultural use. At Bollate, citizens and associations have appealed to the Regional Administrative Court against a facility planned between the Parco Nord and the Parco delle Groane; at Magenta a petition against the project on the former Novaceta site has gathered more than 1,200 signatures; at Lacchiarella residents demonstrated in July against the facility planned there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Italian operators, who are themselves players in this game, point to the same risks. Giuliano Peritore, president of the Italian Association of Internet Providers (AIIP), estimates the energy bill for 5 gigawatts of installed capacity at no less than 7 billion a year, and warns against building cathedrals in the desert. Antonio Baldassarra, chief executive of Seeweb, spoke at the 2025 Digital Ethics Forum of \u201ca new season of digital property speculators\u201d, with the risk of consuming land and restructuring the grid at public expense, and asks that \u201cany incentive, including on energy, be non discriminatory, horizontal and available to all operators regardless of their size\u201d. The Italian companies already in the market manage 512 megawatts in all: the advantage granted to large foreign investors is paid for by them, and by the users who pay the grid tariffs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sloweb calls for the implementing decrees of the enabling law to provide for:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sources<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Terna, requests for connection to the national transmission grid; il Post, \u201cAvremo abbastanza elettricit\u00e0 per tutti i data center?\u201d, 25 July 2026. Open, \u201cLa rivolta contro i data center arriva in Italia\u201d, 4 September 2026. Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, \u201cLombardia: la rivoluzione dei data center che nessuno sta governando\u201d, 2026. Chamber of Deputies, enabling law on data centres approved on 24 February 2026. Lombardy Region, Regional Law no. 11 of 3 June 2026. Ministry of Enterprises and Made in Italy, press release of 4 August 2026. Statements by Giuliano Peritore (AIIP) and Antonio Baldassarra (Seeweb), 2026; Antonio Baldassarra, speech at the Digital Ethics Forum 2025. Tom\u2019s Hardware, 2026 capital expenditure of Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon. Directive (EU) 2023\/1791 on energy efficiency and the delegated regulation on data centres. Legislative Decree 152\/2006, Article 208(11)(g); Legislative Decree 36\/2003, Article 14; Legislative Decree 387\/2003, Article 12, and Ministerial Decree of 10 September 2010, point 13.1(j).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Sloweb\u2019s position on data centres. 14 September 2026, updated 22 September 2026. Pietro Jarre, Mauro Munzi Sloweb was founded in 2017 to stand up for a digital world that is lean, clean and fair: lean in the resources it demands from the planet, clean in the way it treats people\u2019s data, fair in the way […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2445","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-non-categorizzato"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
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