We must not pit ecology against sovereignty

In France and across Europe, data center projects are facing growing opposition. From local protests and legal proceedings, to anti-digital, anti-AI, anti-data center political rhetoric.

But this opposition reminds me of a bad memory: the fight against nuclear energy in previous decades. By trying to move away from the atom, part of the green political movement plunged Europe into dependence on fossil fuels and Russian gas. I fear that with data centers and AI, we are making the exact same strategic mistake.

Let’s be clear: energy consumption is a crucial issue. We must lower our consumption, our usage. But rejecting these infrastructures on our soil won't erase the need for computing power: it will only move it to where energy is carbon-intensive and environmental standards are non-existent. Pitting digital sovereignty against ecological transition makes no sense. Wanting a green future without controlling our digital infrastructure is choosing powerlessness.

Growing digital consumption

Some opposition to datacenter installations is based on one argument: we must stop increasing pressure on planetary resources and the digital sector, and the growing digital sector is the perfect scapegoat and the easiest target to hate.

Easy to hate because it symbolically represents, for many, screen addiction, automation, job losses, and the techno-fascism of Thiel and Musk. Even if, like any symbol, it's mostly an extreme oversimplification that ignores the other, positive side of the balance.

On the ecological front, we can only agree on the fundamentals. Our planet is pushed to its limits and we must lower our consumption. Yet digital usage is exploding in a world where every sector should aim for the opposite. Its share in France's carbon footprint has risen from 2.5 to 4.4% in recent years in France. This growth is roughly identical on a global scale and trend projections predict further increases.

Can we afford this? Certainly not.

But is "digital" a homogeneous whole? Not so sure, as this IEA study shows (International Energy Agency).

• Digital technology, and especially AI, has positive impacts when it comes to optimizing energy systems, renewable energy management, weather forecasting models, and medicine.
• However, digital technology and AI are also, unfortunately, accelerators for the fossil fuel industry, enabling better exploitation of existing deposits or the discovery of new ones.

And what's missing from this IEA study is the environmental pressure linked to the AI industry's consumption of mineral resources to build increasingly powerful equipment and ever-more energy-hungry data centers

We could also mention the trend in the US to build new gas plants to power datacenters.

Obviously for these reasons, I can only agree with opposition to datacenter installations. But opposing without nuance is also forgetting the positive impacts of digital, AI included, which is today necessary to optimize our logistics and energy flows in a world of 10 billion inhabitants.

And also, this opposition in Europe seems to me to overlook a key detail as Charles Gorintin pointed out on LinkedIn:

Refusing a data center in France eliminates no requests. It will be served elsewhere, on a gas or coal network, with an economic loss for us. Every gigawatt we don't build here gets built where electricity is dirtier.

I'll even go further, pitting sovereignty against ecology is counterproductive.

Sovereignty vs Ecology: the false dilemma

Ecology must take priority over the economy. Obviously. Because yes, having a rising stock portfolio in a burning world doesn't make much sense, which is what Mathilde Saliou essentially tells us:

make a small effort to break free from the economic reasoning to which we are all most accustomed. Take a step back to escape the reflex of direct competition with the United States and China. If it's about reproducing their model, in any case it's a losing game. And then what is this masochism, which consists of trying to "catch up" with countries that are examples of neither democratic nor environmental terms?

However, I have another reading of this: failing to address sovereignty issues leaves us unable to control our own choices on ecology.

If you don't have your own champions, your own infrastructure and a strong market, you suffer the standards of others. Americans will prioritize profitability and hyper-consumption, while China will arbitrate according to its strategic interests alone.

When I speak of suffering, I'll clarify my point.

Our digital dependence is a huge flaw in the European model. We are dependent on more than 70% of US digital products in Europe. Our data is in the US and we pay a constant digital tax from our economy that goes there.

This vulnerability is not just economic. It's a sword of Damocles hanging over our political institutions. It's for example:

• direct attacks on the International Criminal Court to cut off access to American software
• massive manipulation on social networks to influence voters' choices

No, we're not just fighting to have a few more euros. Sovereignty is ensuring that we remain master of our choices. It's ensuring that we can still say no when the American administration tries to impose the abandonment of corporate diversity policies on us, or when it tries to influence French judges on trials.

Economic power ensures independence and guarantees that our voice is heard when we speak about ecology or human rights.

Pitting sovereignty against ecology is a false dilemma. There is no world in which we can choose our future on ecology while being economically and politically dependent on other countries.

And AI, like the construction of data centers, is part of the keys to remaining sovereign. Saying "Not in my backyard" (see NIMBY phenomenon) makes no sense.

Because digital (and AI) are today tools of economic and political dominance. They are increasingly deployed in cyber warfare, network manipulation, and military drones that have become the new standard on modern battlefields. And I'm not saying that these are perspectives that delight me, but remaining on equal footing will allow us to remain calmer with each new moment of madness from a foreign president who would seek to harm us.

But beyond this simple defensive posture, it's also giving ourselves alternatives.

Sovereignty as a lever for control and exemplarity

Sovereignty over data centers is the ability to regain control of digital infrastructure in Europe, a battle certainly lost in the last decade, but not beyond recovery.

Regaining control, having a hand on our tools allows us to impose our energy mix (decarbonized), our efficiency requirements and our eco-design rules. Impossible on a 100% American or Chinese cloud.

Sovereignty and more broadly, economic power, is giving ourselves the means to impose standards (eg environmental regulations) that foreign markets are forced to follow if they want to sell us their products. Because yes, as long as it remains attractive to sell to a market of 450 million inhabitants with good purchasing power. That gives us leverage.

And sovereignty is not necessarily "producing more", it's giving ourselves the institutional power to say "no" for example if an industrial player wants to create a gas plant to run a data center, or to impose energy consumption caps.

Finally, sovereignty is not just industrial and economic muscle; it is resilience to climate, energy, and supply shocks. A form of sovereignty that destroys its own environment undermines its very conditions of existence in the long run.

Deployments yes, but not at this speed

We must regain control of our infrastructure. This involves datacenters in Europe and European development of AI to extract ourselves from our dependence on the US and China.

This is also the conclusion of the shift project in this 2-hour synthesis video that covers all their recent work on the subject:

we are not saying that you must not do AI, but not in this deployment trajectory

Including a question about sovereignty at the end of the video which is answered in two parts:

• It's important to reduce our share of energy spent abroad, for dependence reasons (preferred term to sovereignty in their case) but also to be able to impose our arbitrations, on consumption or type of use.
• It's important to have our own models developed in Europe, and/or to favor open weight models, less consumptive

For these reasons, we need datacenters in Europe BUT managed by European actors.

So yes, even the shift project says so.

Now, what does it mean to be digitally sober? And are all the large European investment projects realistic?

What is our energy consumption in Europe? What is our capacity to increase energy production? What are the necessary projections of electrical power needed for the construction of datacenters? And most importantly, is it realistic? What trade-offs do we need to make?

It's not a question of being for or against a technology, I still think we must create our infrastructure. But is it physically possible?

The figures

It's good in theory but we need figures.

The current electricity consumption of datacenters in Europe is approximately 75 TWh/year (or nearly 2.5 to 3% of continental electricity).

Projections for 2030 (on consumption) envisage that datacenter consumption will reach 150 to 170TWh (4.5% of electricity produced). For 2035, 230Twh is expected, or about 155Twh more than today. First question, are we planning to increase our energy production by 155Twh?

There's a physics problem. The increase in expected consumption is greater than the increase in production.

On the production side: Between now and 2030, Europe plans to put into service approximately 150 to 200 TWh additional decarbonized electricity (solar, wind, nuclear). This will be the result of massive projects that take years to come to fruition.

On the demand side: there is competition for use. Europe must electrify cars (moving to 100% electric), industry (decarbonizing steel mills) and heating (heat pumps). Datacenters enter into direct competition to capture each available decarbonized gigawatt.

To be clear:

• Datacenters alone are demanding +155 TWh over the same period.
• But the ecological transition already requires powering heat pumps, industry and millions of electric vehicles, which already absorbs the entirety of the remaining 50 TWh (from the most optimistic scenario).

The balance: There is physically at least 50 TWh missing in decarbonized energy by 2030 to satisfy both the objectives of the European Green Deal and the current trajectory of digital technology.

If we go slower on decarbonizing transport to fund digital, that would be a fundamental error.

Moreover, certain locations are already under enormous energy strain:

• Ireland, 20% of its electricity consumption is dedicated to datacenters and had to put in place a de facto (imposed) moratorium on the construction of new data centers
• Cities like Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris, Dublin are under strain. In some places, you can no longer build new homes due to lack of available energy.
• in Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom), pending connection requests for energy and industrial infrastructure today represent more than 500 GW of power (equivalent to several times the total installed capacity of France).

Not to mention grid connection issues. In Europe, it takes an average of 7 to 10 years to strengthen the electrical network and connect a large datacenter.

An infrastructure project filed today is assigned grid connection dates between 2032 and 2038 in several European hubs. The demand is not only greater than production: it's growing 3 times faster than the network's capacity to lay cables and build substations.

The 230 Twh trajectory is not physically realistic.

So can our network absorb it? No, and especially not at any cost, not by sacrificing the rest of decarbonization efforts. France has a unique advantage in Europe: electricity among the most decarbonized on the continent thanks to nuclear and renewables. But our production capacity is not infinite. Blindly accepting all datacenter projects would create a direct conflict of use with reindustrialization or the electrification of our transport.

So there are two possible scenarios:

Choice 1, we suffer: we can indeed refuse these installations. Tech giants then create these capacities in the United States or elsewhere, sometimes by turning gas or coal plants back on, while selling us their services, imposing their terms on us, including environmental ones. Europe pays for the service, suffers the global footprint and loses control.

Choice 2, we choose: Europe and France assume building datacenters on their soil, but since electricity is not infinite, they use sovereignty to arbitrate and ration.

We will need digital sobriety. And being sober is not about refusing to build infrastructure at home out of ideological and moral posture. It's using our sovereignty to condition and select.

Being sober and sovereign means:

1. Rationing network access: Reserve our decarbonized electrical capacity for datacenters run by European actors or engaged in strategic uses (health, climate, research, industry), rather than to the overconsumption of foreign recreational services (yes, we can tell ourselves that Grok nudes and Ghibli-style images might not be the priority, right?).
2. Impose drastic environmental standards: Prohibition of water-cooled systems, efficient PUE (energy efficiency for short), mandatory ecodesign (for example recovery of waste heat to heat neighboring homes)
3. Bet on frugal models: Favor the development of smaller, specialized and "open-weight" AI models, far less greedy for computing power.

The overconsumption predicted by Big Tech is not inevitable. It's based on a financial bubble and lots of investments in closed circuits that sell investors a growth plan. This overinvestment makes it possible to fund loss-making uses, uses that shouldn't be free (like Grok on X for example), a multitude of frontier models, hundreds of software to do the same thing, tensions on resources minerals, tensions on components (see the ram crisis) even though some mass public uses are already addressed. We won't sort our emails faster with Opus 72. Most open source models are already sufficient for the vast majority of uses. We have already made enormous advances in optimizing training or inference costs. Technology continues to improve in energy efficiency but uses intensify. New chips have appeared, new algorithmic approaches have come to light. It's time to pocket our gains and invest now in these avenues.

I hope this bubble bursts to clean up the market. But on the other hand AI won't disappear with the bubble, any more than the internet disappeared after the internet bubble burst in 2000.

But I hope, for us, that a European actor remains after this explosion.

What is the sustainable trajectory?

So what's the limit? For digital to remain sustainable and not become an energy burden, Europe must impose a landing ceiling.

Instead of accepting the 230 TWh projections pushed by Big Tech and the current bubble, the sustainable trajectory for Europe is around 80 to 100 TWh/year by 2030-2035 (or about 10 to 12 TWh for France, which corresponds to the prudent scenarios of RTE). At this scale, the datacenter footprint would remain contained at less than 3% of European electricity.

This "electricity budget" of 80 to 100 TWh makes it possible to reconcile the two imperatives:

1. Fund sovereignty: Provide the computing power needed to develop our own champions, secure our data and run strategic industrial and scientific AI.
2. Preserve climate: Don't siphon off the decarbonized gigawatts that our electric cars, heat pumps and factories urgently need to get out of oil and gas.

Conclusion

Pitting ecology against sovereignty is a mistake. We won't chart a viable ecological course isolated in our own corner without economic and digital independence. But the other way around, we won't be able to continue increasing our uses indefinitely without hitting the wall of physical reality.

Building data centers is about rebuilding sovereignty and giving ourselves back the power to choose. It's not a blank check to build without limits. But it's the only political tool that gives us the right to say no, to set rules and enforce caps.

Refusing datacenters on our soil under the pretext of ecology is an illusion. It only exports pollution to neighbors with a carbon-intensive energy mix, while depriving us of the keys to our future. If we want a digital world compatible with planetary boundaries, we must have the courage to build its infrastructure at home, to have the power to dictate its rules.