About 100 protesters break into a Microsoft data center site in Amsterdam

The data center backlash crossed the Atlantic, and climbed a crane. Protesters got into a building site on the outskirts of Amsterdam where Microsoft's new data center is going up on Thursday morning, Tom Warren reports for The Verge, citing Reuters.

About 100 people got onto the site, according to Reuters. Some scaled a crane to hang a profane anti-AI banner. Others unfurled one accusing Microsoft of powering genocide, and chanted for Microsoft to leave and for a free Palestine. The group Geef Tegengas helped organize the action against the project's three 85-meter towers.

A ban with a loophole

Amsterdam already said no. After a temporary halt announced at the end of 2023, the city barred any new data centers through 2030. This one is going ahead anyway: it was planned back in 2016, before the ban, and British developer Pure Data Centres, which is building it, found loopholes to reach construction. Microsoft will be the only tenant.

Part of a pattern

It isn't an isolated protest. Earlier in the week, activists in Dublin set up a mock Israeli army checkpoint in front of a Microsoft facility, part of a wave of actions across Europe. In the US, voters just rejected unrestrained data center growth on ballots in several states.

Microsoft's own buildout is hitting other walls, too. Last month it dropped the UK's largest data center project after grid officials said the site wouldn't get power until the 2030s. And the company has faced protests from inside: employees interrupted its 50th anniversary party and CEO Satya Nadella's Build keynote last year over its technology's use in Israel's war against Hamas, and Microsoft later fired two workers who staged a sit-in in the office of its president.

Why it matters

Two different grievances are stacking on the same buildings: local objections to land, power and water, and political objections to who the compute serves. A data center is the most physical, visible piece of AI, which makes it the easiest place to protest.

For the companies building them, a permit is no longer the finish line. For the rest of us, it's another sign that the capacity everyone's roadmap assumes is going to arrive slower and with more conditions attached.

Scoreboard update: Humans +1. Protesters storm a Microsoft data center site in a city that already voted to ban them.

Stay undead.