02.09.2026

AI, water and electricity – Europe’s energy (and commercial) paradox

As August draws to a close, it is difficult to look back without noting a summer characterised, at least in Romania, by repeated warnings of possible power cuts, appeals to the public to limit their electricity consumption as much as possible, and a practical – rather than an abstract one, of how drought conditions on the continent directly affect the energy security of Member States. 

The severe drought that affected Europe in the summer of 2026 caused the Danube’s flow to drop to dramatically low levels, with commensurate consequences. For Romania, for example, this meant a drastic reduction in the water flow available for cooling the facilities at the Cernavodă nuclear power station, thereby triggering a nationwide energy crisis and forcing the government to resort to makeshift measures. This is, therefore, an episode that illustrates, more clearly than any official statement, just how closely drought, energy production and the stability of national grids are linked. 

It is precisely this context that justifies a ‘broader’ question: how much – or how little – room for error does Europe have when it decides to simultaneously expand energy-intensive infrastructure such as data centres and artificial intelligence facilities? It is therefore the right and duty of citizens to ask the European legislator: ‘How exactly do we manage, at the level of European regulation, the risk that such summers might become the rule rather than the exception?’ 

An initial response to this question comes in the form of the Technological Sovereignty Package, adopted by the European Commission on 3 June 2026: a set of legislative measures designed to reduce Europe’s dependence on suppliers of digital products and services from outside the EU, covering not only cloud infrastructure and artificial intelligence but also areas such as semiconductors and open-source software. 

The ‘centrepiece’ of this package is the Cloud and AI Development Act (‘CADA’), which aims to triple the Union’s data centre capacity within 5–7 years, through an investment effort estimated at around 200 billion euros, the majority of which will come from private sources. The Act introduces a four-tier framework for digital sovereignty, under which public institutions are to assess their cloud and AI service providers according to their degree of independence from operators outside the EU.

To support the physical expansion required to achieve this objective, CADA also proposes simplified authorisation procedures and priority connections to the electricity grid for projects that meet sustainability criteria, as well as tripartite agreements between data centre operators, energy sector stakeholders and public authorities, designed to coordinate expansion with the actual capacity of national grids. 

At the same time, however, the Commission has also put forward a draft delegated regulation – which has passed the consultation stage on the dedicated energy portal – setting out the rules for using the information collected to assign energy ratings to data centres. Such a rating scheme has its origins in Commission Delegated Regulation 2024/1364 on the first phase of establishing a common Union system for the assessment of data centres, which established a European database of data centres and a mechanism for reporting key performance indicators. The stated aim is to make the energy consumption of this type of infrastructure (data centres) more transparent and to transform the information collected into a resource for public policy-making and for more sustainable procurement of digital services at European level. 

The rating scheme forms part of a broader package on the energy efficiency of data centres, which also includes the development of minimum performance standards, as well as obligations for independent energy audits (already in force under the Energy Efficiency Directive). 

However, despite this legislative effort to limit the pressure on resources, the Commission itself launched, on 30 July 2026, a tender to select consortia to build and operate so-calledso-called ‘AI Gigafactories’ – very high-capacity computing centres dedicated to training the most advanced artificial intelligence models, backed by up to 10 billion euros in European and national public funds and intended to unlock at least 20 billion euros in private investment. 

However, these ‘AI gigafactories’ are, by their very nature, designed to be massive, energy-intensive investments – in other words, precisely the type of project that comes into direct conflict with the restrictions on resource consumption that the Commission is seeking to introduce through the aforementioned legislative package. A data centre’s energy consumption is not merely a by-product of its operation, but a direct result of its architecture. Servers process data continuously and, in doing so, generate significant amounts of heat, which must be dissipated via cooling systems – which are themselves major consumers of energy and, often, water as well. Added to this is the power supply and distribution infrastructure, network equipment and backup systems, all of which are essential for ensuring service continuity.

As these systems operate continuously, without seasonal breaks or fluctuations in operating hours, their energy consumption remains consistently high, regardless of the season[1] , and the trend is clearly visible –  researchers at Cambridge show[2]that data centres consume so much energy that they heat up the surrounding environment, creating ‘heat islands’ that affect over 340 million people. 

What emerges from the overlap between these two strands of European legislation is a tension that is hard to ignore. On the one hand, the Commission aims to accelerate digitalisation and achieve technological sovereignty by tripling data centre capacity and funding artificial intelligence ‘gigafactories’. On the other hand, the same Commission is developing transparency tools, minimum performance standards and rating mechanisms precisely to limit the resource footprint of those very same systems. In effect, one arm of European policy is attempting to curb precisely what the other arm is committed to tripling. 

The legitimate question that remains in these circumstances is not merely whether these objectives can coexist in theory, but whether this ‘middle ground’ that the EU executive appears to be pursuing will produce, in practice, the intended effects on both fronts: genuine technological and commercial progress, as well as effective protection for European citizens against climate-related risks (with increasingly frequent droughts and wildfires being merely the most visible)and energy-related risks that the proliferation of such infrastructure may generate or exacerbate. 

The sustainability criteria attached to the simplified authorisation procedures under CADA or the tripartite coordination agreements with the electricity grid are, without doubt, steps in the right direction, but they remain, for the time being, relatively new instruments, whose actual effectiveness has not yet been tested on the scale of the threefold increase in capacity proposed by the Commission. However, if the precedent of summer 2026 teaches us anything, it is that the energy system’s ability to cope with consumption – particularly during periods of prolonged drought – may already be outstripped by the pace at which the digital infrastructure is intended to be expanded. 

Last but not least, both avenues – digital expansion and the measures designed to mitigate its impact on resources – are funded, to a large extent, by European public money and, ultimately, by citizens’ contributions. 

This is, in fact, what the debate really hinges on – if the balance proposed by the Commission (accelerated digitalisation, coupled with sustainability safeguards) proves too fragile, Europeans will be the ones to pay the price twice over: both the energy and climate crisis exacerbated by rapid digitalisation, and the economic cost of potentially falling behind the United States and Asia in the race for artificial intelligence infrastructure. 

An article by Ingrid-Amelia Apetrei (Managing Associate) – iapetrei@stoica-asociatii.ro – STOICA & ASOCIAȚII.

 [1]Daniel EWIM, Nwakamma NINDUWEZUOR-EHIOBU, Ochuko ORIKPETE, Blessed EGBOKHAEBHO, Akeeb FAWOLE, Chiemela ONUNKA, ‘Impact of Data Centres on Climate Change: A Review of Energy-Efficient Strategies’, 2023, The Journal of Engineering and Exact Sciences, available athttps://www.researchgate.net/publication/373295068_Impact_of_Data_Centers_on_Climate_Change_A_Review_of_Energy_Efficient_Strategies.