EU adopts data centre label – Borderstep involved in its development

On 21 September 2026, the European Commission adopted the common EU-wide rating scheme with an electronic label for data centres. This marks an important milestone in the development of a harmonised European data centre label. The Commission expects the first labels to be issued in 2027.

Data centre label creates transparency on energy and resource use

The label is based on data that data centres already report under European reporting requirements on their energy and environmental performance. In future, this information will be used to generate an electronic sustainability label automatically. In particular, the label is intended to make energy and water consumption more visible and to facilitate comparisons between data centres within a given region.

The label therefore adds an assessment of sustainability performance to the European reporting requirements introduced in 2024. It provides operators, policymakers and other stakeholders with a common basis for assessing the energy and resource efficiency of data centres. At the same time, the scheme is intended to create incentives for more efficient data centres.

Borderstep involved in developing the rating scheme

For Borderstep, the decision is the result of several years of research and development work. Simon Hinterholzer, researcher at the Borderstep Institute and Borderstep project lead in the EUDCEAR project, played a central role. Together with Ernst & Young (EY) and the Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT), Borderstep developed the technical foundations and proposals for a European data centre rating scheme on behalf of the European Commission. Simon Hinterholzer played a major role in shaping the development of the EU-wide sustainability label.

A key question in the project was how existing sustainability indicators could be combined into a transparent and robust rating scheme while also taking different regional conditions into account. The European Commission took up the proposals developed in the project and incorporated them into the system that has now been adopted, in a modified and simplified form. It had already published its draft for public consultation in spring 2026.

The new data centre label creates, for the first time, a common European framework for assessing the energy and resource consumption of data centres on a comparable basis. The fact that our work from the EUDCEAR project has been incorporated into this instrument marks an important step from research into European practice.

Borderstep research moves into European practice

With the Commission’s decision, a central outcome of this work is now being put into practice at European level. The technical foundations developed in the EUDCEAR project are becoming part of an instrument that is expected to be used across Europe from 2027. In this way, the data centre label translates scientific approaches to assessing energy and resource use into a concrete European policy instrument. — Simon Hinterholzer, Borderstep Institute

Simon Hinterholzer is a renewable energy engineer and researcher at the Borderstep Institute for Innovation and Sustainability. His research focuses on the positive and negative sustainability impacts of digitalisation, with a particular emphasis on the assessment of data centres and cloud computing. Through proposals for an EU-wide sustainability label and minimum requirements for data centres, he has helped shape the regulatory framework in the EU. In 2026, his research received the Best Paper Award at ICT4S. Working at the intersection of digitalisation, energy and regulation, he investigates how digital infrastructures can be made more sustainable and how their environmental impacts can be assessed robustly.