The Greens/EFA Group in the European Parliament invited SDIA's CEO, Max Schulze, to the third Roundtable on Data Centers and Digital Infrastructure, hosted by Members of the European Parliament Kim van Sparrentak and Rasmus Andresen. His contribution focused on three key concepts: a digital economy framework; what sustainability truly means for the digital economy and its infrastructure; and the role of the public sector in enhancing transparency and setting guidelines. In light of the new publication by the Greens/EFA “Digital Technologies in Europe: An Environmental Life Cycle Approach", this article explores these points in more detail.

A Framework for the Digital Economy

To better understand the complexity of ICT sustainability, a holistic, system-based approach is helpful, guided by our Roadmap to Sustainable Digital Infrastructure by 2030.

The central point of interaction between society and the digital economy is the digital products and services it provides: social networks, service-based offerings, and business-to-business products. Companies producing these products are labeled as technology companies, although most do not create technology but merely apply it. They combine freely available open-source software technology with a business model.

Digital infrastructure provides both the fuel (digital computational power) and the data transport mechanism (fiber optic networks). Data centers are the power plants of the digital economy, while fiber optic networks represent the power grids. Digital computational power — consisting of networks, processing, and data storage — is what makes digital products and services operational.

What Sustainability Means for Digital Infrastructure

Sustainable digital infrastructure must meet three central aspects:

Firstly, it should not have negative environmental impacts: green electricity, sustainable buildings, energy and heat reutilization, cooling, recycling all electronic waste, eliminating diesel generators, as well as minimizing waste and unused capacity.

Secondly, it should ensure the competitiveness of digital companies choosing European digital infrastructure.

Thirdly, it should enable inclusive prosperity. The operational model of global, large-scale digital infrastructure players does not currently create prosperity for the regions where the infrastructure is built. Infrastructure should empower local businesses and create sustainable digital ecosystems.

The Role of the EU: Demanding Transparency and Setting Guidelines

Europe is already a leader in many impactful technical regulations such as the Ecodesign Directives for servers. However, effective systematic action is still lacking.

The digital economy is a system whose foundation is digital infrastructure. Today, we lack reliable information on how many resources this system consumes. Transparency can be created at two levels:

• At the level of digital products and services: create transparency over energy and resource consumption to enable informed customer decisions

• At the level of digital infrastructure: establish national and regional transparency registers for digital infrastructure operators to report to

This also aligns with our Open Data Hub, an initiative to promote transparency, trust, and data availability.

The second step is to set thresholds for key sustainability metrics of digital infrastructure, along with a timeline for when climate neutrality must be achieved. The digital economy benefits massively from the fact that environmental and social costs of digital products are not factored in — which is why cloud providers like AWS can report profit margins of 42%. This can only change if the EU sets the right guidelines.

Policy Recommendations for the European Union

Four key recommendations:

• Require national governments to introduce a transparency register that meets the European Commission's requirements and metrics.

• Coordinate the development of a roadmap with milestones to achieve net-zero emissions by 2030.

• Create the regulatory framework to price in externalities, thus reflecting the true environmental and social costs of digital infrastructure.

• Support European initiatives and companies addressing ICT sustainability — through financing, facilitating tax and regulatory relief, and creating an enabling political environment that rewards sustainability.