Data Centre Acceleration Zones reflect big business demands
When the CADA proposal was made public on 3 June 2026, it became clear that many of big business’ demands were accepted. Under the CADA proposal, EU member states would have to designate data centre acceleration zones in which permitting procedures are fast-tracked. Projects developed within these zones will receive the status of strategic importance under the Environmental Omnibus, echoing the experience in Aragón.
Member states that want to introduce sustainability requirements in these acceleration zones, cannot impose stricter rules than the watered-down EU rating scheme that includes the Microsoft secrecy clause.
The proposal’s provisions on public participation also raise concerns. It provides for a single point of contact whose main objective will be to support developers and operators. That contact would also become responsible for providing information to the public with the explicit goal of “increasing public acceptance of the data centre project”.
Rather than establishing a stronger framework for public participation, the proposal risks treating public acceptance as an obstacle to be managed. The status of strategic importance is also linked to the Environmental Omnibus which, among other things, limits the ability of impacted communities to challenge projects.
By email, a spokesperson from the European Commission points to “key provisions on the public interest” to show how the proposal does not reflect industry demands. Yet, as SOMO already noted, safeguards set in the text will not prevent Big Tech companies from benefiting or even dominating these zones. There is no guarantee that the economic value created stays within the EU, let alone the impacted communities.
EU politicians argue that this is the only way for the block to win the AI race. This is a red-herring. It will only take us to a road of further digital dependence, while also sacrificing our environmental safeguards and climate change ambitions.
The EU’s data centre policy was shaped by those who had access. More than nine in ten recorded lobbying encounters were with corporate actors, and the goal of tripling capacity was set well before any proposal was written down. The result is a CADA proposal and a rating scheme that bear industry’s fingerprints, from fast-tracked permitting to weakened sustainability rules.
More than nine in ten recorded lobbying encounters were with corporate actors. The result is a CADA proposal and a rating scheme that bear industry’s fingerprints, from fast-tracked permitting to weakened sustainability rules.
When expansion is presented as a matter of ‘keeping up’ in an ‘AI race’, crucial questions go unasked, such as: who owns the infrastructure, who bears the costs in water, energy and land, and who captures the value? These are political choices, not technical inevitabilities.
Resistance to this infrastructure is growing. Across Europe, local communities and civil society groups are organising to stop dirty data centres. They are asking for a pause in the development of large scale data centres to ensure that the infrastructure that gets built actually addresses the needs of the wider public and that social and environmental conditions are in place.
The onus is now on the European Parliament and Council to ensure that the interests of citizens and communities, rather than those of Big Tech, are fast-tracked.
SOMO invited Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Siemens, Schneider Electric, the OVH Groupe, Deutsche Telekom, Equinix, QTS Data Centers, the European Data Centre Association (EUDCA), and the European Commission to respond to the findings in this article. The responses received have been incorporated in the text where relevant. You can find the full replies here, except where companies asked us not to.
Source: corporateeurope.org
