New EU rules stall due to lack of data center data

The European Union’s new sustainability reporting rules for data centers are facing implementation challenges due to poor-quality and incomplete data submitted by operators. The issue emerged during the first reporting round under the revised EU Energy Efficiency Directive (EED), which requires large data centers to disclose information on energy use, water consumption, and broader sustainability metrics.

The directive was introduced to improve transparency and help the EU better understand the environmental footprint of the rapidly growing data center sector. However, experts found that only a minority of facilities submitted usable data, while some member states submitted nothing at all, creating major gaps in the central European database. In several cases, reporting errors were so significant that corrections had to be made manually.

A major challenge comes from colocation facilities, where infrastructure providers manage the buildings but customers control the servers and operational IT data. This makes it difficult to capture a full sustainability picture, especially for metrics such as IT energy consumption, water usage, and heat recovery. Inconsistent definitions and weak measurement systems have further reduced data reliability.

Despite these problems, the European Commission is moving ahead with stricter efficiency requirements, including a planned Data Center Energy Efficiency Package expected in the second quarter of 2026. This package will introduce an EU-wide rating scheme and minimum performance standards for data centers, reinforcing the bloc’s push for greener digital infrastructure and stronger environmental accountability.

Data-center disclosure gaps show how sustainability-reporting regulation is running ahead of underlying data infrastructure, and hyperscalers, colocation operators and their power suppliers all need to close the gap. Our data-and-digital and climate-action teams help data-center operators and downstream customers build the energy, water and emissions data infrastructure that credible ISSB S2 and CSRD reporting requires.