Waag in FD: non-transparent, undemocratic decisionmaking on data centers

Meta, Facebook's mother company, is about to buy 166 acres of land in Zeewolde (Netherlands), to build one of Europe's largest data centers. The decision about this will be made by the city council of Zeewolde. The data center will take up a large piece of fertile agricultural ground and will emit twice as much as the whole city of Amsterdam. So, why does the city council get to decide, and not national politics?

Marleen Stikker and Quirine van Eeden from Waag wrote an op-ed piece about this in the Dutch newspaper Het Financieele Dagblad.

• Read the op-ed piece in FD (in Dutch)

More on data centers and the landscape

• Acid Clouds: 'We want to visualise the "invisible cloud"'
• The data walk by Waag
• The data walk in NRC Future Affairs (Dutch)
• The data walk in VPRO Tegenlicht: Future Shock (Dutch)