欧州のAI野心とデータセンター反発：モラトリアムを求める15カ国の抗議と調査報道

Your film is now ready to be shown. Good morning. I'm Justin Hendricks, editor of Tech Policy Press. We publish news, analysis, and perspectives on issues at the intersection of tech and democracy. Europe is investing heavily in AI and the infrastructure behind it. The rapid expansion of data centers is raising questions about environmental costs, workers' rights, and who gets a say in these decisions. This week, we're looking at the growing opposition to data center expansion across Europe. With protests taking place against data centers across 15 countries, Deputy Editor Ramshia Jahangir speaks to campaigners, as well as journalists, Mayling McNamara of Investigate Europe and Daniel Houdin of Lighthouse Reports, about who gets to shape Europe's digital future and who pays the price. Here's Ramshia. This month, the European Commission is marking European AI Innovation Month. bringing together policymakers, industry, and researchers to showcase how AI can strengthen Europe's competitiveness.

But Europe's AI ambitions require infrastructure, and the rapid expansion of data centers is raising questions about energy and water use, as well as environmental costs and impact on local communities. This weekend, more than 100 groups across 15 European countries are mobilizing against large-scale data center development, calling for a moratorium on new AI projects. I spoke to the campaigners and protest organisers about what's driving these protests, what campaigners want to change, and who gets to decide Europe's digital future. My name is Rosie Leonard. I work as the data centre campaign lead in Friends of the Earth Ireland, and I'm based in Dublin. My name's Irene Eskene. I'm the Community Campaigns Manager at Global Action Plan, working with communities facing data centres. And I'm also playing a role coordinating StopPertilityDateCenters.eu. I'm Aurora from Dunubes de Camerío, and that means your cloud, drys or river.

We are a Spanish data center resistance, and we are also part of the Spanish coordination of the campaign of the moratorium. Thank you so much, wonderful group. And I just want to appreciate first that you are joining us a day ahead of the protests starting across Europe. So busy times, and I really appreciate your time and space for Tech Policy Press. Maybe we could start a little bit by introducing what StopEU Data Centres is to our global listeners, and how did you come about it? So StopEU Data Centres.eu is a large coalition now with over 103 different organizations supporting us from 16 countries across Europe, planning currently 85 actions across Europe and counting. it's a movement of civil society groups, digital rights groups and especially communities facing data centres who are coming together onto the European political stage to demand a moratorium and so groups are facing data centres in lots of different contexts

and different national spaces where the politics of what's happening vary but groups in all the different levels and across different countries have said that a moratorium is what we need to put halt to the development of large scale data centres so that we can have the democratic debate that we need to consider the huge environmental, energy, water, social impact of data centres. And so really it's a day for those groups to come and step proudly onto the European political scene and say we're here and now we're ready to be a force to be reckoned with and politicians need to listen and hear our call for a moratorium. And generally what we've seen so far in Europe, momentum has been slow, at least at the public level, especially when we compare it to what's happening outside Europe, specifically in the United States. How is it challenging to mobilize people on the ground? And what are the type of communities that are coming together for this effort? For us, it takes a lot of time to create a community and awareness. We have been traveling around Spain for four years in very tiny places

where they are facing the problematics, not only with the data centers, but also the mineral extraction that are going with data centers and the macro-energetic problems related with data centers. So finally these people are having this conversation, these rural communities are having this conversation. And in the cities, they're having a conversation about AI. And we are able to bring these two worlds together in only one conversation together. So for us, it has been a long time to do that. So it's when you want to be an agriculturer and you have this land and you have to put the seeds and wait until it's the proper momentum. I think right now in Europe is the proper momentum to do that. Yeah, I would really agree with what Aurora said. So in Ireland, our context is kind of interesting because in Ireland right now, 23% of electricity goes to data centres, which is really, really high. And it's been much higher than in a lot of other European countries, also like states

in the United States for many years. And there have been, you know, waves of calls for a meritorium in Ireland. But I think in the last year and a half, there have been a lot of new proposals for data centres that are coming in, like Aurora said, across the island, also at a time of really rising electricity bills and a real need, I think a real sense of urgency for people to ask, why is this happening so fast? Why is this industry developing so fast at such a massive scale in Ireland when there are still so many issues around, say, energy poverty, around electricity bills being very high, around fossil gas lock-in? We have in Ireland a reworrying project happening in the west of Ireland where there is plans for an LNG terminal to import frack gas from the states. It's being proposed by government, which has been really unpopular and really worrying because fracking is actually banned in Ireland. So there is this kind of question over who is benefiting from this development?

How is it affecting our bills? How is it affecting fossil gas lock-in? And I think that what we've seen in the last year is communities in areas where data centres are being built are getting a lot more organized than they might have been previously before. And I think that is really making people pay attention because they are very credible local voices who are really worried about the impact on local electricity constraints, on emissions, on electricity prices, like I said. So it has brought the issue to a new level and the organization has been fundamental to that because previously I think it was isolated individuals, possibly smaller communities, making planning applications. But now the organisation is much stronger and that's really, really brilliant. And I think what's really important about this linking in on a wider European level is one of the questions that we often get asked in Ireland by people who want the industry to keep growing here. They say, well, you know, if you have a meritorium in Ireland, you just want it to move elsewhere.

You just want the DAS to move to Spain. and what we're able to say now is actually no we need we need a much stronger pause the EU was talking about tripling data center capacity it's going to cost a lot of money it's going to lock in a lot of fossil fuels communities across Europe are saying the same things in different places and that's really really powerful and because it is ultimately saying look who is banning from this is it going to be a small amount of American multinationals or is it going to be people on the brand. So it's a really interesting moment. So I think the context in England and Wales and the UK has been quite different because maybe a year ago you had one or two small community groups, particularly those in the Greenbelt area who were facing data centres and they were the ones getting some profile from it. But over the last year, as it's been clear, the huge scale of the data centres that we're seeing being proposed, hundreds of them that would require potentially tripling, you know, doubling or tripling the UK's entire electricity supply.

And we've been having forcing that debate into the media. Communities in inner cities, communities in post-industrial areas are joining those in rural areas to say that they're not happy about this and they're fighting at the bit. And this summer has seen a kind of quite rapid transformation of data centre activism taking place. The phone has been ringing off the hook with groups saying, we've just found out about a new proposal down our road and we're not very happy about it. How do we organise and fight it? Well, the communities have been saying, I've just been reading about data centres and didn't realise that our council has been signing off deals and approving data centres, that we have no idea what's happening and we're very worried about the consequences. And there's been an absolute groundswell of community saying, wait a sec, these politicians have been saying they're going to build these data centres and they've not been having the conversation with us about the consequences. Where's the democracy here? whereas they've been putting in feed of information requests and finding out that councillors have had information that's been withheld from the communities and they're absolutely up in arms about it at this moment

and ready to come together and fight. The groups vary and they have slightly different perspectives. The concerns of a post-industrial community are going to be slightly different from a rural one are going to be slightly different from an inner city community. But they're all aghast that these decisions are being taken and imposed on them without their participation and in often many cases in opposition to what the community says they want. It's interesting because when we, big platforms and companies building data centers have also made community engagement a big part of their public strategy, right? Like we're seeing them hiring community-focused positions, community-focused positions and just having a lot of engagement and building things at a very local level to help communities. So that it's very ironic, but I'm also curious from a policy perspective and in concrete terms, what role can local communities play in decisions around planning or building data centers?

And is there a way that they can meaningfully object to a project? Yeah, I think there's loads of ways. I think one of the things we're seeing in Ireland is, like Alan said, a lot of the, I suppose, tactics of the industry have been to hide impacts and to try and get in with decision makers before any level of democratic planning happens. And I think what we're really seeing in Ireland is that is now changing, where there is a lot of pressure on the government to enforce more transparency requirements. At a minimum, right, at a minimum, you know, transparency requirements are needed. So that is shifting the balance power a little bit, where I think that there is no longer this idea that companies can submit a planning application that has very little detail, that is very poorly put together, and everyone else has to sort of figure out how it interacts with like climate law, how it interacts with electricity prices,

how it interacts with potentially local water shortages or anything like that. So I think at a very local level, that kind of power building amongst communities is impacting on politicians. It definitely having an impact on government politicians in Ireland It would be fairly sympathetic and enabling of the tech sector in Ireland So I think that very very strong I think it also moving into a very interesting space where we want a meritorium but we want a meritorium so that we can put in place more sustainable guidelines, you know, so we can actually put the ball back in our course, take the power back and say, these are the terms under which we think more private data centers are acceptable, given the current context, given the current challenges, given the need to tackle climate breakdown. So I think that's very powerful and the influence it's having. And then there's another aspect of it that I think is quite interesting, which is tech worker organizing, I think, is gaining momentum as well.

And that is putting additional pressure in terms of an industrial strategy to say, we don't, again, the corporate power that these companies hold, we don't necessarily agree that they need to be carrying out these mass layoffs that we're seeing, like we're seeing a lot of layoffs in Ireland in the tech sector. And workers in a lot of instances are directly relating that to companies expending so much capital on data centres and trying to go in hard on generative AI as a sort of almost like a disciplining tool of workers that they're not going to benefit from. So there's sort of a very interesting moment, I think, for mutual power building between communities and tech workers in the sense of pushing decision makers to say this industry has developed at such speed and at such scale with so little safeguards for a very long time that it is no longer legitimate for you to keep pushing it this way. You have to now recognize this as an electoral issue and as a workers issue. We're also having this conversation and the moment you mentioned during what the European Commission is calling the European Innovation Month.

And there's a lot of push for AI adoption across European industry and also public services. Just today there was reporting around EU encouraging AI support in lawmaking and policymaking as well. So how do you respond to that moment at the time that you're pushing back against building more? And, for example, one of the communities that are raising up against data centers are Mora del Ebre, that is an hyper-skinned project coming from the European Union. So when we are talking about that we want sovereignty, digital sovereignty, we want digital sovereignty as we thought of food sovereignty. We want to have the minimal needs that we need, but also with social justice. We don't want to create sacrifice zones in some places that are less powerful or put in these mines of critical minerals in some regions. And, for example, we have this battle right now in Spain

because we are trying to approve, Spanish government is trying to approve a real decree around data centers that is not an out, but at least is some kind of regulation and a starting point of having some regulation around, some regulation on data centers before the election. But what happened? That the European Union said yesterday that we cannot approve the royal decree because it has to go before to them. So what I understand from my individual point of view is that the tech lobbies are really powerful in the European Union and they are trying to push against any kind of regulation in any kind of country. So we need to be smarter. We need to be farther. And we don't want to have this narrative of sovereignty in the European Union without looking for social justice. We have to look for another kind of narrative that everyone can be safer and have our communities keep going without this kind of dangers in our place.

Yeah, I think that point around sovereignty is so important. Like we hear that a lot in Ireland. And then I think what's so funny about it for me is we hear this idea of, you know, EU tech sovereignty. When we look into what's actually being built and proposed in Ireland in terms of data centers, it is either the same names. You know, it's the Amazons, it's Google, it's the big American companies building the data centers directly, or it's big co-locator providers building data centers that it then turns out in many cases they are leasing to, say, Amazon or TikTok. So, again, it's really poorly defined, I think, as I've ever mentioned, what the sovereignty actually mean, how much compute is needed, where is the figure of this tripling of data center capacity, where does it come from? Like in Ireland, the energy regulator carried out what they called the market intelligence exercise when they were writing their recent connection policy for data centers last year.

And they said that, oh, you know, we've asked the industry, we've asked the energy providers, and it looks like there's 5.8 gigawatts of future demand in the pipeline, which would be the same as the amount of electricity that Ireland uses right now as I'm talking to you. So it would be huge. And again, it's like, where did this figure come from? On what basis is it justified? You know, these are questions that have not been worked out. And I think it all leads back to this idea of a meritorium. This is an industry that is advancing at a very quick scale, but for whose benefit? You know, and all signs we see sovereignty seems to be pointing at more or less the same companies benefiting. And there's really brilliant research from SOMO that I'm sure you're aware of, which points to this. And I would encourage anyone listening to read it because it kind of tracks the companies who are building out. And that kind of power mapping, I suppose, is very important when we discuss this, especially for policymakers. I think it's always interesting to hear about these government initiatives that big tech are pushing for, disseminating the use of AI and creating demand for data centers across the state, across public bodies and across industry.

Because what it shows is that this is a top down initiative to build out data centers. The estimate of US$7 trillion being spent in five years is not coming from people demanding extra data center capacity. In fact, there's a recent Baines & Company report that showed a revenue gap of US$4 trillion annually in 2030. They're spending so much money on data centers, they're not even clear where the revenue to pay for that and get a return on that is coming from, which is what's leading to all of the discussion about it being a bubble. And that demonstrates something quite important, I think, which is that this is an initiative from big tech, who amass huge money piles from their monopolistic practices, arguably, and from investors who see this as a way of capturing rents into the future and dominating the future global economy. but it's not it's an investment cycle and there's very worrying signs that it is a bubble and there's very worrying signs that actually this isn't something which people workplaces or enterprises are demanding at the scale of which it's being built out which leaves the question

what are we going to end up with when a devaluation takes place and the rest of it and policymakers i think would be incredibly wise to question what that means because it's not the case the scale of the hype coming from these companies to benefit their own share offers and their own capital raising is what's driving the speed and pace and demand to push aside every single barrier and every single constraint on that build out and people are saying wait a sec why are you rushing so much why are you shifting our planning laws so we no longer have as much voice in it why are you saying why are you accepted as acceptable that big tech is lobbying for the abandonment of climate targets when it's hype and it's obviously hype and i think what's really worrying and what i see is communities that i speak to are having really nuanced detailed debates about ai and data centers and the role of big tech in society and yet our politicians are in a slightly different place they're saying this is the only way forward we have to do it there is no choice there is no

alternative and it feels very much like they've completely bought in to the hype that's coming from these big tech companies. And what the Days of Action are about is those people having that discussion, reclaiming democratic right to say that we should have sovereignty over the decisions about data centres. Like, sovereignty is about people making decisions and democracy. And at the minute, we've got politicians who are going headlong at speed to build ever more and bigger and saying every single barrier should be moved out of the way, whether that's climate constraints, whether that's concern about water, whether that's community constraints, and seeing community objections as a barrier or constraint on this build-out which must take place. Whereas actually that's democracy in action. And it's those communities who are taking action this weekend, whether it's having a march in Dublin or marching in Madrid and Barcelona, whether it's having public debates in their communities, whether it's writing poetry as they're doing in Slough, whether it's protesting about the cutting downs of trees in Finland. That's what sovereignty over AI is about.

is about people taking action together and exercising their democratic right to say we should be the ones to decide on what conditions these data centres get built out, on what conditions they are, on what environmental harms we think are acceptable and how we should be mitigating those harms. And so if we're going to have a conversation about sovereignty, it's so important we push it back down to those community discussions which I see happening because the gulf between where the people are at and where our elected leaders are at at this moment is a very worrying place to be that there's such a gap. And I think wise politicians would be waking up and going, having those communities and leading those discussions in their communities and coming up with a policy based on where people are actually at, not where big tech lobbyists are telling them they need to go. Campaigners and protesters have raised fundamental questions about the data center boom,

about who gets access to information, who bears environmental and social costs, and what Europe's ambitions for technological sovereignty actually mean in practice. These questions are also at the center of recent investigations into the industry. Last week, Tech Policy Press, in partnership with Investigate Europe and other media partners, published an investigation into labor abuses on data center construction sites. Separate reporting by Investigate Europe and Lighthouse Reports have looked into Big Tech's influence over EU transparency rules and the public's right to know about the environmental costs of data centers. Lighthouse Reports has taken this issue further with a legal challenge under the Aarhus Convention. I spoke to Meling McNamara from Investigate Europe and Daniel Howden from Lighthouse Reports about their work and what will it take to influence policymaking on data centers. Daniel and Meling, thanks so much for being here. you've both at your organizations been investigating different aspects of your data center expansion.

Nailin, you investigate Europe recently in partnership with Tech Policy Press, has published this investigation on conditions of workers building those facilities and how also previously big tech has influenced EU rules in terms of transparency. And then Lighthouse has done something very interesting as a journalistic organization and taking this issue further by filing a legal challenge on EU approach under the August Convention So let start by briefly introducing your investigative work on this topic and what do you think it reveals about how the industry operates in Europe? Yeah, I mean, this really was an important investigation for us because so much of what we've been seeing is, you know, the way in which we're unable to penetrate inside data centers, right? What is being disclosed to us and what is actually happening? These sites and these projects are so secretive, and they're usually secretive because of the client confidentiality, right?

So typically behind these large projects that are run by really big companies, we have big tech companies, right? They're the ones who are the clients that move in. But what we hear so little about is the people actually building these projects during active construction. And so what was really important about this was to actually get inside and understand. I had a tip-off that there might be something going on up in Sweden. But then what I found when I did this was that there was a number of issues all around Europe, and it concerned a lot of the construction companies that were actually hiring these contractors and subcontractors. So this was a major point, and I was able to really get access to workers for the first time and able to actually get access into some of the real conditions that they're facing, both through their wages but also through their living conditions and their day-to-day. And Daniel, what prompted your investigation into the transparency aspect and also more necessarily take this issue further by filing a legal challenge? Our starting point for this investigation were the same kinds of questions

that people all over the world are increasingly asking about the AI rollout and about its most visible manifestation, which is data centers. They want to know how much water is going to get used. They want to know how much power is going to be used. They want to know what are the potential forms of pollution this creates. They want to know about climate emissions and those consequences. So if you start from those questions, it's been extremely hard to get simple answers to these. And our focus was to target an EU effort to gather information. Essentially, the European Union has for the last three years been on a huge information gathering spree. They have probably the best answers to those questions anywhere in the world. They're being held centrally. The member states have been told to gather up key performance indicators on every data center in Europe.

So that is the water and power usage, that is excess heat, that is the kind of indicators that would help us to reconstruct climate emissions. All of this gets centrally gathered. It's been gathered in a place where freedom of information laws should guarantee us access to this. So we began asking for it. To begin, initially, we were told by member states that they haven't yet gathered the data. Then we were told that it was commercially confidential. And then finally, we received the string of refusals from the European Commission. And it became clear. And answers to this question were really helped by the work that's been done at the Corporate Europe Observatory. And some of the reporting has also been done by Investor at Europe to highlight how big tech companies got to write their own provisions into European laws. and strengthen the commercial secrecy around individual data center sites.

So what you can get publicly is aggregated to the point where it's completely useless for communities themselves and for people of any kind of democratic participation. So we're kind of locked out of answers to the questions that we might have. Strategic litigation is a poorly understood tool. It takes an enormous amount of patience to wield it effectively. But the one aspect of it that doesn't necessarily require so much patience is that strategic litigation is fundamentally about changing public discourse. You set up legal challenges. Of course, you hope in the end to win your legal challenge. But the fact of a legal challenge in and of itself can generate headlines and it can help the public to see where their politicians stand. and what influence over them the tech companies have. And that can be really clarifying. And that's why we took the decision.

We don't relish the idea as journalists of writing 16,000 word legal submissions, but sometimes that's necessary if you want to move at the pace which can actually help this. While we're trying to break through what we call the wall of silence and data centers, the facts on the ground are changing every day. and reporting that illustrates the human cost of that in terms of data center construction workers is profound. The signs from the little windows that we can look through to see the bigger picture, the climate emissions situation is profound. So making the stakes clear for the public. And there's one last thing I would say about it. People have really responded to the idea that investigative journalists spend a year pushing with every lawful means to get answers to this. And it's really helped people to understand that there is a conspiracy of silence and that their own kind of gut feeling in response to these companies actually accords with reality.

And sometimes the answers you can't get are almost more illustrative than the technical information that you might have otherwise been able to obtain. And it really says something that you spend a year and also investigate Europe has been looking into this issue that it's so hard to get access to critical information by journalists. So imagine for public, and I was speaking to campaigners of the EU by protest this weekend earlier before speaking to you, and they were talking about the same fundamental question, is that how do you support development of projects when you don't really understand who they're for, what they're for, and at the same time your electricity bills are going up, up, up, because you just, so there's this communication gap and public gap that we're seeing, But it's just so hard to also understand at the same time that from the commission and from the at the political level, they have bought into this idea of going all out on adoption and building for adoption without actually understanding how much does what is at stake here.

So, yeah, one of the things that I wanted to come into as well is commercial confidentiality is often the excuse. The commission users and generally also globally do hide data about environmental impact, but also other impacts. So how do we go past this problem and what is the fundamental legal but also democratic problem when this is the argument they use? Well, maybe Daniel can go first around the work that they're doing, and then I can speak a little bit about some of the access issues that we've had in terms of making the public aware of what is going on behind some of these data centers, right, with workers, right? And I'm talking at all high up the chain, right? So, Daniel, if you'd like to go first, then I can go in. One of the first things that comes out is that people feel powerless in the face of what is described as an inevitable AI build-out. But we do actually have laws, and those laws do offer protections when it comes to our right to know.

One of those legal frameworks is an international convention, the Office Convention. And what that enshrines is our right to know, especially when it comes to emissions-related information. and office is really specific in so much as it says that this right supersedes commercial confidentiality in all but the most limited of circumstances. Now, this is an international treaty. All EU governments are signed up to it. It is legally binding, but it isn't the substitute for the commission changing its own stance and deciding that transparency is the way to go. We really are in a very interesting political moment. We're having this conversation in the immediate wake of the U.S. midterms where there was essentially a wipeout for the industry itself.

A large amount of money Was sunk into contests all over the country In search of positive outcomes For light regulation or deregulation Or avoidance of any regulation tool over tech There were data centre provisions on many of the ballots And they all got swept away Inside of public opposition And trust has been right at the heart of that I know from conversations that I've had that people in senior roles, big tech companies, know that they've got this wrong. Their secretive approach, born out of a culture in Silicon Valley of NDAs, which are used for right, left and center for almost everything, has just bred this culture in which you change the facts on the ground, you give away as little as possible, secrets from your competition, secrets from the public authorities. The public is disregarded. in our reporting which we found senior people in the data center

industry referring to the public as cave people for their opposition to data centers they're all having a good laugh sitting up on stage and cave refers in this instance as citizens against virtually everything and then everyone falls about laughing so there's a content for the public, a culture of secrecy and this means in practice that people feel that they're being lied to and manipulated that even in instances where data centers could be a good option for a community, maybe they have a water surplus, maybe they have sources of power which aren't going to mean that the centers compete for resources with housing and ordinary people. Even those instances, they're now getting blocked. As much good work has been done and out of the work Lighthouse has done, I think, investigate Europe and many others have done really useful reporting here public has been well ahead of both politics and journalism

there has been a kind of folk wisdom in people's attitudes towards big tech and data centres and now it's up to politicians, it's up to civil society to journalists to inform that resistance public has been well ahead on this. Yeah I think I might add as well, you know, I don't think we can underestimate the amount of money that is now being poured into Europe and European data centers. We're seeing a migration from a lot of investment in the United States due to a lot of the pushback migrate now into Europe. And particularly what we've seen is the Nordics. Data centers come in and they'll come in for all sorts of reasons They look for a way to have a wedge into a community and they move in and they will use what they can to get the contracts I think we also can underestimate the amount of money but also the legal threat that communities and the public and journalists face if they do try and

cover these stories. And this is something that we came up against when we did this story as well. There's a lot of money involved, not only with the big tech companies, but with the companies that are also profiting hugely from building these data centers. There is a lot of fear for those who are on the subcontracting chains that they will not get these jobs if they speak out. So there's a complicity of silence, there's a culture of silence, and there's fear that they won't get the next jobs as these subcontracting chains move around Europe in groups, right, hiring the same people and hiring the same companies, if you stick your head above the parapets, it'll be cut down. You won't get another contract. And this is what we've seen, right? So there is also, of course, the legal secrecy, the NDAs that are at every aspect of the project. But then there's also something, I think, less visible, right? And that is that sense of hiring precarious workers

who don't have a law of power, who don't have a long-term contract, who come from a poor EU country or even not from an EU country and cannot speak up. So I agree absolutely that ultimately, you know, the fact that people did speak up and showed tremendous courage and bravery and took incredible risks is the power of the public, right, to hold ultimately, like, these companies accountable. And you can see that in the States, of course, it was on the ballot, and you can see how they can't necessarily triumph, right? But I do think that information is power, and to stymie that information getting out to the public is absolutely the point, because the public does wield the most power here. And so I think it is on the shoulders of journalists, on the shoulders of politicians, on the shoulders of anyone who can actually join up the dots around Europe and beyond to present this to the public in a way that they feel that they can take some form of actionable defense.

I think we've seen in Ireland efforts to stymie some of these objections through legal means. And I think that we're going to see that more throughout Europe as well. We know the bottleneck happens during the planning permission process, and we know it happens through any form of legal objection. And once that gets to the bottleneck, it's pretty much a clear path for data centers. And sometimes countries, communities will have buyer's remorse, but it's really difficult once it's being built, once it's in the active phase, to go back. So I think that is where they're hoping they can keep the silence until they actually break ground. We can see what happened in Finland recently, right? It's now been suspended, this project that cut 250,000 acres in Finland without, you know, environmental planning going through. But how many other data centers are doing this right now? So I think we need to ask those questions. Certainly, Netherlands was also president of data center development

being stopped in response to protests and opposition. But I think this is what both of you are talking about, that accountability to the supply chain and policymaking process, I think, is very important and there are gaps there. And I often ask this question. Of course, there's a lot of public outrage right now. There's a lot of public resistance. Certainly, this weekend is one of the biggest, I think, moments of momentum against data centers. But realistically and in concrete terms, from the policy perspective as well, can communities be involved in that policymaking process and throughout the supply chain decision making. Is there anything legally that requires their involvement? And I would also point out this irony because we're in the European Innovation Month, what the commission is celebrating right now. And there's an Applied AI Summit, which is a year after the Applied AI strategy was introduced happening this month. A lot of people in civil society organizations and researchers and communities have said the

same thing, that they're not being involved in those discussions. They've also had trouble registering for these events. It's sort of the same story that happened with the Dublin Summit under the Irish presidency. So how do we involve the communities in these decisions outside protests? I'm happy to jump in there. If you want to make a journalist feel really awkward, you just ask them, what are you supposed to do with their work and with their findings? It's like, okay, but what do I do about this? How do I respond to it? And I think this is where non-profit, mission-driven newsrevers really have a responsibility to provide some parts of the answer there and to work more broadly and in a more collaborative way with civil society organizations and others who can actually make suggestions and interventions, like give paths to action.

The traditional journalist model was, I stay completely outside of processes of change. I deliver my findings, and the world needs to change in response to them if it wants to, but that's nothing to do with me. Non-profit journalism needs to begin with the understanding that investigations, findings are upstream of policy and culture, and you've got to be willing to walk downstream part of the way towards people who are actually working on change and people who are making culture. I give a few examples to make a point. A 16,000-word Orfus submission seems like an unlikely publication to drive Wilde's popular response. But the fact of that legal challenge drove headlines. The fact of those headlines then gave us a chance to work with popular creators who have really substantial audiences running from half a million upwards in different countries.

And those creators knew how to translate those findings into a public conversation, which would both be funny, entertaining, informative. and the volume of response and questions that those posts got meant that they're now completely switched on to the idea that data centers are a hot cultural topic. So that's a form of public awareness. What you're doing there is building a constituency that can help to change the political calculus for the actual decision makers. If we go back a year or go back two years, let's say that you are a regulator, you are somewhere in the European political decision-making framework, your political calculus is pretty clear. You have the largest lobby in the EU by some distance. It's spending freely. It can offer jobs in the future. It can offer potential theoretical rewards in a way that you can sell to constituents right now.

Your political calculus leans totally towards buying into the future. and you're being told by well-paid and intelligent people that opposing data centers means opposing the future, which isn't a great look. What we're doing at the moment, yes, we can talk about very specific policy prescriptions, but we're working on changing the political calculus here. You are sitting at some point in the decision-making hierarchy. That calculus also needs to change for you and you need to see how it's going to be to your benefit, your constituents' benefits, going to make a difference or you are visible and will be scrutinized for the decisions that you make. So the hard end of that is investigative journalism that highlights the influence on specific decision makers and at the cultural end of it, there's a growing constituency which is activated around the idea of asking questions and being skeptical about visions of the future that have been sold.

Yeah, and if I may just jump in one last bit, is that, you know, as part of this story we did, we highlighted the existing unions that were available to some of these workers. You know, I don't think you have to reinvent the wheel, right, or create new things that are already in the public, but what you can do is help to strengthen what does exist and to, you know, have this form of information sharing and to show that because some of these things are companies coming in without collective agreements, deciding not to do collective agreements, whether they're led by the big tech companies or they're led by the contractors. And a lot of the workers, for example, weren't aware of this. Or if the unions were there, they weren't speaking in the language that a lot of these workers use. So I think it's sort of making it aware of what sort of public entities exist for workers to or those involved to be able to get these sort of protections, right? But I also think, of course, with Investigate Europe, we do things at the EU level, right, as well. And part of that is really to talk to some of our policymakers looking at,

for example, the Quality Jobs Act, right, that they're considering now for December, and how to then strengthen the rights of workers and the general oversight of some of these sites so there aren't secrecy causes in a way that unions can actually get access. And in the course of our investigation, just in the last week, there's this incredible momentum that you're seeing that in the public that they know this is going to go public, right? So maybe collective agreements that were stalled at the moment actually got pushed through, right, as part of reporting or making more visible. But also, too, you know, you're starting to see a much bigger momentum of how people can start to enshrine more laws to protect workers in these kind of really extraordinary circumstances is when you have a buildup that's accelerating so much quicker than normal, you're having sites that are so much more dangerous than normal, but you're not getting access. So even just since publication, unions that weren't able to get access to some of these sites, whether it's the Netherlands or it's Finland or it's Sweden,

have been able to actually get access now in ways that I don't think they were before. And I think that this is really important, the way that civil society can also work together and really just highlight what's out there already. So I think there's good ways that you can work. And I do agree. I do agree with Daniel. I also think, you know, there still is and can be a firewall, right, between journalism and civil society. And at the same time, there could be an exchange of real value here where they don't have to be so separate from each other. And I think that's critical. Absolutely. It's the season for collaborations. And we're all here for it. Thanks. Thanks, Hamsheng. That's it for this episode. I hope you send your feedback. You can write to me at justin.techpolicy.press. Thanks to Ramshan and her guests. Thanks to my co-founder, Brian Jones.

And thank you for listening. Policy Press.