Around 100 demonstrators entered the construction site of a Microsoft data center in Amsterdam, with some climbing a crane to hang a banner reading “fuck AI,” Reuters reported. Protesters also displayed a banner on the site that read “Microsoft powers genocide,” and the crowd chanted “Microsoft has got to go” and “free Palestine.”
The Amsterdam action is part of a broader wave of protests against data centers in Europe. In Dublin on Tuesday, activists set up a mock Israeli military checkpoint outside a Microsoft data center. The same week, voters across the US rejected unrestrained development of data centers, as AI data centers continue to appear across the country and draw frequent opposition from locals worried about the impact on their communities.
Opposition to the Amsterdam project comes more than a year after the city banned new data centers until 2030, following a temporary stop announced at the end of 2023. Microsoft will be the sole tenant of the new data center, and the project is moving forward as planned as far back as 2016, before a ban was in place. The site, built by British developer Pure Data Centres, has also navigated some loopholes to reach the construction stage.
Microsoft has faced other pressures on its data center buildout. Last month the company abandoned the UK’s largest data center project after local electricity grid officials said the site won’t be supplied with power until the 2030s.
The software maker has also confronted protests from former employees over the past year. Microsoft’s 50th anniversary party was interrupted by employees protesting the use of Microsoft’s technologies in Israel’s war against Hamas, with one calling Microsoft’s AI CEO, Mustafa Suleyman, a “war profiteer.” A Microsoft employee also disrupted the company’s Build developer conference last year, interrupting Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s keynote, and months later Microsoft fired two employee protesters who occupied its president’s office.
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