Around 400 people demonstrated earlier this month outside the headquarters of the Upper Austrian regional government in Linz against Google’s planned data centre in Kronstorf, a small town of around 3,500 inhabitants. The project covers about 50 hectares, or around 70 football pitches, and construction on Google’s first data centre in Austria began in April. The first phase is expected to become operational in 2027. The scale is hard to miss. So is the power behind it.
A Corporate Project, Backed by the State
Google says the centre will support growing demand for cloud and AI services, create around 100 direct jobs and thousands of indirect jobs, help strengthen Austria’s digital infrastructure and contribute to local sustainability initiatives. That’s the familiar script: jobs, innovation, infrastructure, sustainability. Meanwhile, the company is building a vast new industrial site in a town of 3,500 people, with decisions moving fast enough that residents say they’ve been left with more questions than answers.
Christina Gruber, an organiser of the protest, freelance artist and aquatic ecologist, said, "I believe we need a rethink when it comes to this endless growth and expansion." Andrea Kollmann, a 53-year-old lawyer who travelled from Vienna for the protest, said the project had advanced "much too quickly" and that "everything is extremely non-transparent, nobody knows anything." Those are not abstract complaints. They point straight at how these projects are imposed: from above, with the public expected to absorb the consequences after the fact.
At the groundbreaking ceremony attended by politicians and company representatives, Thomas Stelzer, the governor of Upper Austria, said the centre would send "a strong signal for Upper Austria as a business and innovation location." That’s the language of regional government when corporate expansion arrives. The state doesn’t stand apart from the project. It helps frame it, bless it, and sell it.
Power Hungry, Water Hungry
Residents said they were worried about a lack of transparency around the project and unanswered questions about the cooling systems, water use and the impact on the River Enns. Those concerns sit at the centre of the protest, because data centres don’t run on slogans. They run on electricity, water and land. According to media reports, the first phase alone could consume up to 1.31 terawatt-hours of electricity per year, roughly the annual consumption of 375,000 households.
Google said its data centres are among the most energy-efficient in the world, while critics argued that even highly efficient facilities can consume vast amounts of electricity and water. Efficiency, in other words, doesn’t cancel scale. It just makes the machine easier to market.
The company also said the centre would contribute to local sustainability initiatives. That claim sits awkwardly beside the basic arithmetic of the project: 50 hectares, huge power demand, unresolved questions about cooling, and a river in the frame. The protest in Kronstorf wasn’t just about one site. It was about who gets to decide what gets built, where the costs land, and who has to live with the consequences.
Europe’s Data Boom, Europe’s Pushback
The article placed the protest in a wider European context, noting that Europe is already home to hundreds of data centres while it lags far behind the United States in capacity. The result has been a wave of resistance. Earlier in September, Scotland halted new hyperscale AI data centre approvals amid environmental concerns. In Spain, residents of the Aragon region have launched legal action against a massive data centre buildout by Amazon, while Amsterdam has imposed a moratorium on new data centres over space and power concerns. Denmark has moved data centres to the bottom of its priority list for grid connections, warning of strain on its power grid.
Francesca Musiani, an internet specialist at the French National Center for Scientific Research, said protests have exposed "tension between this rapid expansion of AI and climate objectives" and raised broader questions about digital governance in Europe. She added, "For me, this is part of what sovereignty should mean in practice: the capacity of different levels of society to participate in shaping the infrastructures on which they depend."
That’s the real issue in Kronstorf. Not just whether Google can build fast enough, but who gets to shape the infrastructure at all. In the current setup, the answer usually comes from corporate boardrooms and regional offices, with residents invited to react once the machinery is already moving. The protest outside the Upper Austrian regional government made that arrangement visible. People showed up because the project had already begun, the questions were still unanswered, and the costs were already being counted in water, power and land.