More than 100 groups across Europe are taking part in coordinated protests against data centres on Friday and Saturday, November 6 and 7. The Stop Dirty Data Centres initiative says actions will take place simultaneously in at least nine European capitals, including Berlin, and is calling for an immediate moratorium on large facilities.

The protests come as the European Union seeks to expand its digital infrastructure. The European Commission’s AI Continent Action Plan, presented in April 2025, sets a goal of increasing data centre capacity in the EU to at least three times its current level within five to seven years.

Local and national groups have raised concerns about plans to accelerate data centre construction, questioning where facilities should be built, what digital technology is needed and what the environmental consequences could be. Stop Dirty Data Centres argues that large data centres can increase costs, deepen reliance on major US technology companies and fossil fuels, and undermine democracy and climate goals. Those claims were made by Michelle Thorne, strategy director at the Green Web Foundation and a co-organiser of the Berlin protest.

In Berlin’s Mariendorf district, activists plan to demonstrate against a proposed data centre at 1 p.m. on Friday. The meeting point is Lankwitzstraße 45. On Saturday, the environmental group Grüne Liga and the Nodes of Resistance initiative will hold a nationwide conference in Berlin titled “Connecting Resistance – Preventing Data Centres!”

AlgorithmWatch is also taking part with an email campaign opposing proposed relaxations to data centre rules in a new energy-efficiency law, which the Bundestag is expected to vote on soon. The organisation says more than 160,000 people signed a petition against the plans over the summer, and that it and the Munich Environmental Institute have counted more than 20,000 emails sent to SPD and CDU/CSU lawmakers.

The campaign says the proposed law would weaken sustainability requirements for data centres. AlgorithmWatch representative Julian Bothe said the CDU/CSU parliamentary group wanted to relax those rules further than the federal government’s draft already proposed.

Sources: netzpolitik.org.