Welcome to hyperscaler El Dorado: We have no power or water to spare

If all 300 datacenter projects currently sitting in Lombardy's approval pipeline actually got built, the entire region – population, industry, the works – would have to switch off the lights for real. The 50GW of requested capacity matches current regional output, and it's not like the rest of Europe has power to spare. Everyone around here calls the figure "irrealistico", with serious estimates pointing to something closer to 2GW by 2030. Still a massive number, roughly equivalent to the output of two large nuclear reactors.

Water isn't exactly abundant either. Milan's decorative fountains were switched off this year as a conservation measure – only the second time this has happened since 2022 – amid the worst drought in 70 years. The Po River, fed by Alpine glaciers, is usually generous, but intensive local agriculture is putting the entire watershed under serious strain. The picturesque Lake Como currently sits at just over a quarter capacity, while Lake Maggiore has barely recovered to half.

Lombardy is a special case, a place where every tension around AI's datacenter hunger, the political ambition to cash in on it, and the glaring lack of infrastructure has boiled over at once. Half of Italy's new grid connection requests are concentrated here – and Italy, in turn, accounts for nearly half of all such requests across Europe. Strip out the UK, and Italy represents a staggering three-quarters of all grid connection applications in the EU.

Milan and its surrounding area have essentially become a new Eldorado in the AI gold rush. Why? Because the traditional FLAP-D hub (Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris, Dublin) has long been running at overcapacity, with wait times stretching 7 to 10 years, draconian red tape, and de facto moratoriums in some cases. In Italy, Giorgia Meloni's push to loosen restrictions means wait times – assuming anything actually gets approved – could shrink to as little as three years, the shortest turnaround anywhere on the continent.

That has spawned a genuine "industry" of pending applications. Most of these projects are filed purely to secure a spot further up the queue, then flipped – usually to Amazon, Microsoft or Google – once all approvals are in hand. Even though the companies filing know full well most of these projects will never break ground, the math still works out in their favor. For locals, however – myself included – this permitting lottery has become a genuine source of anxiety.

What the people are saying

"I don't recall reading anywhere in the current administration's platform that they planned to build a datacenter," residents complain, fed up with the dismissive attitude of local politicians in Magenta, on Milan's outskirts, where the town council greenlit construction of a datacenter so massive it would cover an area half the town's current surface.

A center that locals see as the monster from the fairy tale, one they genuinely fear, on environmental grounds. "We'd rather have the ruins of an old factory – at least that doesn't pollute – than have this neighborhood 'revitalized' by a datacenter you can't avoid seeing the moment you step onto your balcony in the morning, with noise that'll blow out your eardrums," said a woman at the October 31 protest in Magenta, not far from where I live myself, west of Milan. I went down to the square that day to take the local temperature, as protests on this issue are rapidly gaining momentum across Milan's outskirts and beyond. Flash mobs, petitions, attempts at dialogue with local councils that have so far gone nowhere; and there's more to come.

Ground zero for this upheaval is Milan, but citizens across Lombardy – Italy's economic engine – are increasingly pushing back against datacenter construction in the absence of clear rules that have buy-in from the communities set to host them. Practically every spot where a datacenter is slated to go up has spawned its own citizens' committee, and together they've formed a highly active protest network that's already spreading beyond regional borders.

These voices of dissent are growing louder, and in unison they're demanding a moratorium that would freeze every project currently in the pipeline. They're also calling for national legislation that guarantees quality-of-life protections in areas slated for datacenter construction. What they categorically do not want is a development model where big investors get to decide, unchecked, where to park these energy-guzzling facilities – leaving local communities to deal with the fallout.

Giorgia Meloni wants to turn northern Italy into a sort of European Silicon Valley, which explains why hyperscale datacenters keep popping up everywhere – like mushrooms after rain, and that's not just a figure of speech. Datacenters existed in the pre-AI era too, but they never posed the kind of problems this new generation is shaping up to bring.

It's hard to say whether a workable balance can be struck. The investments are enormous, and both central and local government see jobs and tax revenue in them. But with less than a year to go before the next general election, a wave of protest – not unlike what's happening in the US – risks snowballing into a genuine threat to Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni's hold on power. That's on top of all the other tensions that have erupted recently in Milan and across the north. As we've seen, American voters have already handed a vote of no confidence to Big Tech moguls and their political allies; it remains to be seen which way things tip in Italy. Meloni has already taken a major hit from her association with US President Donald Trump: she lost a crucial referendum on judicial reform, held shortly before the United States struck Iran.

No click without consequences

But what exactly is the problem with these datacenters, and why are they drawing so much fire? Every time one of us runs a search to figure out what to cook next week, to keep up with the latest interior design trends and self-help fads, or to understand what's up with elevated cortisol levels or family constellation therapy – a tree dies somewhere in the world. You punch a destination into Waze, listen to your favorite podcast in the car, drift off at night to ambient music on Spotify, or binge-watch your way through the weekend – and somewhere, the water temperature of some river you've never heard of ticks up, wreaking havoc on the local community's way of life.

These are broad strokes, of course; digital services also underpin the public sector, government administration, and plenty of other upsides of modern life, not least healthcare and education; they're not just there for our frivolous little pleasures. But these are symbolic images meant to drive home the scale of the problem. We don't yet have the reflex to think in these terms when we interact with technology, but on our globalized planet, saturated with irresistible temptations at every turn, no click comes without a cost. A butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil and triggers a tornado in Texas, as the saying goes.

The whole planet uses AI, and therefore its hyperscale datacenters, but the price of their existence is paid by the people living in the immediate vicinity of these massive structures. And their numbers are climbing fast, driven by a business dynamic that's still poorly understood. And the bigger the business, the further ahead of regulation it tends to run – as protesters in the United States, where these new facilities first emerged, have been pointing out.

According to a recent Washington Post poll, two-thirds of a bipartisan American public – Republicans and Democrats alike – say they're worried about these facilities, viewing them as a net negative for society. Essentially, the responses reveal a public that stands in direct opposition to the Trump administration, for which AI development represents America's defining geostrategic bet for the future.

The bigger picture

Bigger and more numerous by the day – in the US alone, an estimated 5,000 are already active – hyperscale datacenters are under fire from critics who argue they guzzle enormous amounts of energy, often from polluting, non-renewable sources; swallow up vast tracts of land, frequently at the expense of agriculture and local ecosystems; consume huge volumes of water for cooling, at a time when water is becoming a strategic resource in its own right amid climate change; generate heat and considerable noise pollution in their vicinity; risk contaminating groundwater; dramatically increase traffic in the areas where they're built; and degrade air quality. Italy was credited with 168 datacenters last year, while the latest figures from specialist portal Agenda Digitale put the current number at roughly 260, either active or nearing completion. Other sources put the figure even higher, at over 270 already operational. Across Italy, estimated investment in the sector is projected to reach around €25 billion by 2030.

Italy, incidentally, is also the first EU member state to pass national legislation transposing the European AI Act. That's Law No. 49/2026, adopted this past April, which among other things requires an environmental impact assessment wherever a new datacenter is proposed. But it's precisely that environmental and quality-of-life impact that sits at the heart of the protests – the impact studies mandated by the law are widely seen as superficial box-ticking.

The trend toward datacenter construction is on the rise across Europe too. According to the Italian edition of Euronews, Germany tops the European rankings with 529 datacenters as of the end of last year, followed by the UK with 523 and France with 322. Oddly enough, in the global rankings, China actually trailed the UK last year, with 499 centers. Romania, too, is climbing fast in this department. According to Data Center Map, 66 facilities are currently active nationwide, concentrated mainly in Bucharest, Cluj, Timișoara and Brașov. Fast network connection speeds and a diverse energy mix, including renewables, are considered key competitive advantages.

The situation in Lombardy

Beyond the scattered local protests, the first coordinated demonstration took place on October 10. Over a thousand people, representing roughly 40 local civic committees, rallied in Piazza della Scala in Milan, demanding a blanket moratorium – freezing permits for new facilities, halting construction already underway, and regulating the sector through a national plan agreed upon by all stakeholders.

Representatives came from numerous towns across the Milan metropolitan area targeted by datacenter projects: Abbiategrasso, Bollate, Cesano Boscone, Cesate, Lacchiarella, Magenta, Peschiera Borromeo, San Bovio, Rho, Siziano, Sedriano, Settimo Milanese, Vittuone. A month has passed since then, and in the meantime, protests in various forms have continued in a steady cascade, with events popping up across all the small towns ringing the metropolis. This isn't an ideological protest, no outside ideological influence has been established. The civic committees aren't opposed to datacenters per se, which are, after all, both economically useful and practically unstoppable. But they're insisting, firmly, that siting decisions be carefully regulated on environmental grounds.

But before any hoped-for moratorium materializes, the network of civic committees tried to push through a series of amendments to Lombardy's regional law, passed in July following the national law, in a specialized committee of the Lombardy Regional Council. Roughly 200 amendments had been drafted and submitted to the committee by some local lawmakers, but ultimately the entire debate was simply struck from the agenda by the center-right majority and shelved indefinitely. "This sets a dangerous precedent that shrinks democratic space and imposes a top-down rule, sacrificing the right to a healthy environment in favor of Big Tech interests," the organization said in a statement.

At the originally scheduled meeting, Enrico Duranti, a well-known environmental activist and former local councilor, laid out a lengthy set of technical arguments backing the proposed amendments to the regional law governing datacenter construction. Among the critical points raised in the document: the risk of contaminating local water sources, the sheer volume of water and energy a datacenter consumes once operational, and the thermal impact of these facilities on their surroundings.

After this attempt at dialogue was blocked, the organization called for another national protest in Milan on November 21, followed by a picket of the Regional Council headquarters on November 24, when the council is set to convene a session on proposed amendments to the law.

"We're demanding a strategic national plan that assesses how many datacenters the country actually needs, how they should be built, and where. A plan that includes a strategic environmental assessment covering issues like the impact on the energy grid, on public health, on the environment. Without that plan, there's no way to even begin regulating these multi-billion-euro investments currently underway across Italy – investments that would completely upend entire territories, starting with Lombardy," explains Duranti.

Another representative of the civic committee network, Pietro Cataldi, a sitting local councilor in Zibido San Giacomo, speaks in a podcast for the outlet Lettera 22 of "digital colonialism" and territories "devastated" by datacenter construction – citing, for instance, the Lacchiarella-Zibido San Giacomo project, which targets farmland and has been designated by the government as a matter of strategic national importance. He argues the national law on datacenter development was written specifically to fast-track approvals as quickly as possible.

"Local committees spring up because a resident, or a group of residents, realizes something's happening – they form spontaneously, against a backdrop of total silence from local politicians," Cataldi says. He also believes it's not enough to evaluate each project in isolation, within its immediate context; what's needed is an understanding of the combined, largely uncontrollable effect of dozens of new projects across Milan and the wider Lombardy region.

A recent Cambridge University study examining a sample of over 8,400 datacenters, cited by Paolo Pileri, who teaches territorial and environmental planning at Politecnico di Milano, found that their extremely high energy consumption generates genuine heat islands stretching for kilometers around. "It only takes a few months after a facility goes online for ground-surface temperatures to rise, on average, by two degrees. In extreme cases, the increase can reach as much as nine degrees. The effect radiates outward up to 10 kilometers, only dropping off by 30% after about seven kilometers. In short, it's a disaster for the soil, a disaster for everything living on it, and for anyone within a 10-kilometer radius," Pileri told the outlet Altreconomia.

Pileri cites the MXP datacenter project in Magenta as a prime example. Concretely, the project calls for installing 141 diesel backup generators for emergencies, with a combined output of 1,099 MWt. The project, approved by the local council in April, amounts to a campus of five datacenters slated for construction on a former industrial site that's sat idle since 2010. The project's backer is a company owned by the Ukhast real estate investment fund, which specializes in redeveloping abandoned industrial sites across northern Italy.

Under the plan, the campus would cover 130,000 square meters out of a total site area of 215,553 square meters. The buildings are designed to rise 9 stories, reaching 27 meters in height. The facility would draw 300 MW of power, with an official investment price tag of €2.5 billion – which, according to the project's backers, would create 130 jobs.

"I've read the non-technical summary of the Environmental Impact Assessment published by the Ministry of the Environment on March 26, 2026. I'm looking for anything referencing 'climate and heat island effect,' and all I find are generic references to installing low-reflectivity roofing, alongside lines like 'the presence of the datacenter does not alter the local climate.' Which is precisely the opposite of what the scientific literature shows. This is an underestimation that's going to cost us dearly," Pileri adds.

What the European Union says

The negative impact of these new technologies can be contained through regulation, and even water consumption can be minimized using advanced closed-loop cooling systems. The European Union insists it wants to strike a balance between its competitiveness ambitions and public pushback.

"We want to really accelerate the development of sustainable datacenters, so we want to use the most energy-efficient technologies, to be sure we have the most energy efficient datacenters and AI factories as possible, so that our citizens can really trust that we can take care of the really negative impacts of AI when it comes to the environmental and energy sector", said Henna Virkkunen, the European Commission's Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty. She adds that artificial intelligence does come with an energy cost, but on the other hand, it also helps optimize consumption elsewhere; so things might balance out, to some degree.