Poland already hosts one-third of all data centre capacity in Central and Eastern Europe. But as investment pours into artificial intelligence, a debate about the environmental impact is missing.
Ada Petriczko
“AI may seem intangible, but the infrastructure around it is anything but,” Anna Meres of Greenpeace told BIRN. “Behind every AI application are server halls, cooling systems, electricity grids, water consumption and chip manufacturing. AI depends on physical resources that we all share.”
Globally, data centres consumed 448 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2025, according to the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health. Had these centres been a country, they would have ranked 11th worldwide for electricity consumption.
“Energy is the key raw material for the data-centre sector,” Pyplacz said.
Poland’s own projections also suggest that the issue will soon become impossible to ignore. According to the state transmission system operator PSE, electricity demand from data centres is expected to rise from just 0.6 TWh in 2024 to 29.4 TWh by 2040, equal to more than one in every ten units of electricity consumed in Poland that year.
“The key question is what will meet that demand,” Meres said. “Will data centres accelerate investment in renewable energy, storage and grids – or become another argument for burning fossil fuels?”
While electricity dominates discussions about the costs of AI, water receives far less attention. The EU is building its own reporting system for data-centre water and energy use as it moves to triple its bloc-wide capacity by 2035, but in Poland nobody can say with certainty how much water the sector currently consumes.
The state water authority, Polish Waters, does not track data centres as a separate category of water user. Nor does Poland publish aggregated figures showing the sector’s overall environmental footprint.
Pyplacz argues that fears about data centres’ water use are often shaped by the US experience, which does not translate neatly to Europe. Thanks to cooler climates and widespread use of dry cooling, PLDCA estimates the sector accounts for only about 0.01 per cent of total EU water consumption.
But Agata Szafraniuk, who heads the environmental law charity ClientEarth Poland, said the existing rules haven’t been adapted to what data centres actually do.
Their “classic” impacts – noise, air emissions – tend to be modest, she told BIRN. What’s harder to capture is their indirect footprint: strain on local power grids and water supplies and the knock-on effect of driving up output at other facilities responsible for those classic impacts in the first place. “The question is whether environmental assessments of data centres actually account for all of that,” she said.
The lack of data reflects a broader regulatory gap. Current planning law treats data centres largely as ordinary industrial or commercial developments, even though their demands on electricity networks and water resources differ significantly from traditional factories or warehouses.
That gap arrives at an uncomfortable moment. During the massive hydrological drought of 2025, the Vistula, Poland’s largest river, broke all-time records for the lowest water levels since measurements began. At the Warsaw-Bulwary gauge, the water level dropped to just 5 centimetres in September, exposing historical artefacts that had been hidden underwater for centuries.
This year, Poland’s meteorological institute, IMGW, reported that hydrological drought is intensifying again, with warnings now covering roughly half the country.
“With drought and water shortages a real risk, we should be focused on building the country’s water resilience, and that means planning water-intensive projects with other users in mind,” Szafraniuk said. “We don’t want data centres competing for water with farmers or residents, whose needs should come first.”
‘Uncritical enthusiasm’ for technology
While countries such as Ireland, France and the Netherlands have already seen public disputes over the electricity and water demands of data centres, the debate remains largely muted in Poland.
Joanna Mazur, who researches tech regulation at the University of Warsaw and wrote a novel about climate catastrophe, believes several factors explain the silence.
Debate in Poland tends to catch fire only once an issue “lands on our own doorstep”, she told BIRN, and the impact of data centres on ordinary citizens’ lives is likely still “too small, too scattered”, for people to pay attention.
Underneath that sits a second, deeper gap.
“Poland doesn’t really have a substantive debate about the environment or climate catastrophe to begin with,” she said. Drought, for example, “should be on the front pages and on the lips of every politician”. Instead, it gets attention after spectacular disasters, not when the data alone show rivers drying up.
Layered on top of that is what Mazur calls “an uncritically enthusiastic” attitude toward new technologies in Poland, and “AI is no exception here.” The result is that questioning building data centres becomes genuinely difficult.
Mazur believes the debate has become fixated on expanding AI rather than deciding where it is actually needed. She said policymakers should give greater priority to the technology’s “essential uses” and ask what needs does Poland actually want this infrastructure to serve?
“Poland has difficulty funding science, higher education and healthcare – and yet we’re planning to spend as much on digitalization as we do on defence,” she said. “Rolling out artificial intelligence everywhere, just because it’s available, can – and should be – questioned.”
