Europe speaks confidently about digital sovereignty, AI leadership and industrial competitiveness. Yet it continues to overlook the very foundation of all three: data centres.

A recent legal opinion commissioned by the association Bitkom in Germany makes a clear point. Electricity price relief for energy-intensive industries is not only permissible under EU law – it must also apply to data centres if existing rules are to achieve their stated objective. If Europe wants to prevent the relocation of energy-intensive industry, it cannot exclude the digital infrastructure that makes modern industry possible.

Data centres are not peripheral IT facilities. They are the backbone of industrial production, AI development, logistics, healthcare systems and connected manufacturing. Without high-performance, locally available computing capacity, Industry 4.0 simply does not function.

And this infrastructure is energy-intensive. In Germany alone, data centres currently consume around 21 billion kilowatt-hours per year, a figure projected to rise to 30 billion by 2030. Electricity accounts for roughly half of operating costs. Unlike steel mills or chemical plants, however, data centres are geographically flexible. They can be built wherever energy is cheaper.

This is where European policy is falling short.

While Brussels debates digital strategies and AI regulation, new data centre capacity is increasingly being built in regions with lower energy costs – often outside Europe. The consequences are predictable: greater dependence on non-European cloud providers, rising geopolitical risk, and heightened cybersecurity and data protection vulnerabilities.

More fundamentally, there is the risk of what the legal opinion describes as “adhesion migration”: industry follows digital infrastructure. If computing power and AI capabilities are cheaper, more reliable or closer to market elsewhere, investment in production will follow. The relocation of digital capacity can trigger the relocation of industrial value creation.

This is not a theoretical concern. It is economic logic.

EU state aid frameworks are designed to prevent the offshoring of energy-intensive sectors. Yet data centres are absent from the relevant industry lists, despite being indispensable to those very sectors. This inconsistency undermines the effectiveness of the policy instruments themselves.

If Europe excludes data centres from electricity relief mechanisms, it weakens its own industrial strategy. Digital sovereignty is not secured through strategy papers; it is secured through competitive investment conditions. Capital flows to where structural costs make sense.

Europe’s current approach sends contradictory signals. Policymakers call for technological autonomy, enforce strict AI governance, and demand high security and sustainability standards. At the same time, they fail to ensure competitive energy conditions for the infrastructure that underpins these ambitions.

Data centres are critical infrastructure. They are an economic, security and innovation asset simultaneously.

If Europe does not correct course, the loss will not occur through dramatic closures, but through silent non-investment. Capacity will simply be built elsewhere. And once digital ecosystems consolidate outside Europe, regaining strategic ground will be exponentially more difficult.

The legal pathways exist. The economic rationale is clear. The strategic urgency is evident.

If Europe is serious about digital sovereignty, it must treat data centres accordingly – including in energy policy. Anything less risks turning ambition into dependency.

Pressrelease of Germany’s Bitkom: Legal Opinion: Electricity Price Relief Must Also Apply to Data Centres