On The Grounds Of Sustainable Energy, Dutch Senate Rejects Construction Of Facebook Data Center

The Prime Minister of the Netherlands, Mark Rutte. (photo: twitter @markrutte)

JAKARTA – The Dutch Senate on Tuesday, March 22, passed a motion calling on the government to "use its power" to temporarily block the construction of a giant data center. The data center in the Netherlands is planned to be built by Facebook, a subsidiary of Meta Platform Inc.

In December, the city of Zeewolde, 50 km east of Amsterdam, approved plans to build the largest facility of its kind in the Netherlands. From this data center Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp will be able to serve users across Europe.

The facility, which will use 1.38 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of electricity and cover 166 hectares of agricultural land out of a total land area of 410 hectares. The data center is expected to use green energy and create 400 permanent jobs for Dutch residents.

But the project has been opposed by some environmental campaigners who do not want the limited supply of sustainable electricity currently generated in the Netherlands to be used by multinational companies.

A majority of parties in the Senate on Tuesday backed a proposal in which the government led by Prime Minister Mark Rutte was asked to halt the project until a national policy on data centers had been developed.

The motion asks the government to delay construction until it can be determined whether the data center complies with environmental regulations and the facility's undetermined national policy.

Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment, from Reuters on this matter.

Rutte's own Freedom and Democracy Party (VVD) and another ruling coalition party, the Christian Democratic Party, have voted against the motion.

"This is a purely political decision," said the managing director of the Dutch Association of Data Centers, Stijn Grove, in a reaction sent to Reuters. It added that it had been created "largely because it was Facebook", which faced negative backlash against Big Tech as a whole.

Not only are larger data centers more efficient and environmentally friendly, he says, they're also needed to upgrade Europe's digital infrastructure, which lags behind North America and Asia.

Grove said the Netherlands cannot have the ambition to become a digital leader without supporting the infrastructure it needs. Around 60 data center operators in the Netherlands account for about 2.8 percent of national electricity consumption, the association said.