Data Center Policy May Shift to Weigh Workload Value Over Physical Footprint

Data centers are facing increasing scrutiny and, in some cases, regulation over their energy and resource usage. Public opposition to rapid expansion in several regions has intensified this pressure. Much of the scrutiny still focuses on data centers as energy- and resource-intensive buildings rather than on the workloads they ultimately support. As the largely AI-driven build-out of new facilities comes under greater pressure, questions are also being raised about the societal value of the services data centers provide relative to their environmental and infrastructure costs. That remains more of an emerging policy question than an immediate regulatory reality. Today, most regulation and public criticism remain centered on the physical footprint of data centers – power demand, water use, land consumption, and grid impact – rather than the digital services running inside them. Discussions at Informa's Data Center Europe event in Vienna, which ran October 13-15, suggested that the distinction may become hard to maintain over time.

Data centers and the internet more widely support a broad range of workloads and services, from enterprise and business applications to social media, video streaming, generative AI chatbots, agents, and other AI services. According to Sandvine's 2024 Global Internet Phenomena Report, video streaming, social media, and related applications from companies including Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, and Netflix account for about 65% of total internet volume. Some digital services are already facing greater scrutiny in their own right. Social media regulation, including Australia's move to ban access for under-16s, illustrates how governments are becoming more willing to intervene directly in digital activity when broader social concerns are at stake. That does not amount to data center workload regulation, but it does show how the societal impact of online services is increasingly part of the policy debate.

AI is likely to sharpen that debate further. Estimates of AI's contribution to total data center footprint vary, but Goldman Sachs has projected that AI's share of the overall data center market will double to 30% over the next two years, taking share from conventional and cloud workloads. At the same time, although data center opposition groups – particularly in the US – have largely focused on the environment and physical footprint of new facilities, there is also concern – often driven by a lack of transparency – about the services those facilities host and enable, most obviously AI. "The AI boom is being sold as inevitable progress, but the real question is not whether artificial intelligence can do useful things in theory. It is who owns it, who profits from it, what it is mostly being used for…," environmental group Greenpeace said in a recent publication.

In response, data center operators and the wider industry have pointed to the broad range of services that data centers provide beyond AI, and on which many aspects of society depend, from banking to healthcare. In a recent blog post, AWS CEO Matt Garman made that case directly, writing: "Today, virtually everything we do each day—shopping, banking, stock trading, ride hailing, booking travel, receiving healthcare, streaming entertainment, as well as critical research in everything from preventing and curing disease to finding ways to use less energy and natural resources – is digitally driven and enabled by data centers, which manage the computing, storage, and access necessary for these activities." Still, the question remains whether all workloads should be treated equally if policymakers decide how to allocate scarce power, approve grid connections, or weigh the local impact of new projects. Healthcare research, for example, may be seen differently from gambling, social media, or some speculative AI use cases. To date, however, there have been no significant attempts to reflect those distinctions directly in regulation, for instance, through lighter treatment or faster approvals for facilities that support a higher proportion of socially valuable workloads.

In practice, that would be highly challenging. Cloud and colocation environments support multiple workload types, often in the same facility, and digital infrastructure is far too complex for neat categorization. Even so, some broader distinctions are possible, particularly if governments begin to place greater emphasis on sovereignty, critical services, flexibility, or public benefit. Responding to a question from Data Center Knowledge at the Informa Data Center Europe event this week, a panel of industry experts acknowledged that greater scrutiny around workloads, services, and their wider societal value could emerge in the future.

Branko Jovanović, CTO for data centers at ADVANT d.o.o. and president of the IT infrastructure and data center section of the ICT Association of Slovenia, suggested there are already early signs of that shift. "There is maybe a case which is already under supervision," Jovanović said, pointing to recent amendments to grid connection rules in Finland that would prioritize smaller data centers under 1 MW. In practice, that could mean some enterprise-owned or research-oriented facilities are favored over larger AI, colocation, or hyperscale cloud development, even if the policy stops short of explicitly ranking workloads by social value. "If we take into consideration Finland's proposal on prioritizing energy permissions, it is already touching the workload."

Source: Data Center Knowledge — summary compiled with AI assistance; facts as stated in the original.