Dutch police arrested hundreds of people after a protest at a Microsoft data center in the Netherlands turned violent, according to the Dutch publication NOS. The site is owned by Pure Data Centers. The demonstration was organized by the "Stop Dirty Data Centers" coalition and was the first of several actions the group has planned across Europe.
NOS identified the group at the site as Fossielvrij, which opposes the use of fossil fuels in data centers. The organization has pointed to the jet engines Elon Musk installed at xAI's Mississippi data center as an example of the practices it objects to. The action was intended to be peaceful, but another group joined the demonstration and broke through the fences around the site, leading to a confrontation with police.
Police arrested the suspects for domestic violence and took them to a cell complex, where authorities will decide whether to hold them longer. Police said all suspects will be heard afterward. The protest continued action that began the previous Friday, when demonstrators breached the Microsoft data center.
Fossielvrij framed its campaign around the strain data centers place on energy systems and housing. The group said on its website that gas prices are rising and new houses are being postponed because of an overcrowded power grid, while tech billionaires including Musk and Jeff Bezos build energy-guzzling data centers. It argued that Big Tech's power can be reclaimed by pausing construction and letting the public decide democratically what AI is used for, so that it does not come at the expense of living environments. The group said it would then assess how many more data centers are needed.
The coalition has additional actions planned in Amsterdam, Dublin, Warsaw, Denmark and several other cities across the continent. The protests come as the AI data center build-out faces growing opposition in the United States.
Opposition has also hit a Google data center site in Finland, where roughly 1,300 acres of forest and trees were cleared without an environmental impact assessment, displacing wildlife. The clearing led to a criminal probe of Tuike Finland Oy, the Google subsidiary in charge of the site.
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