When Susan Schaap, 61, traveling from her Dutch homeland in Zeewolde to the nearest city of Leylystad, a 30-minute drive will take her through vast fields of tulips, interrupted only by wind turbines and occasional flocks of sheep. But if parent company Facebook Meta’s plan is approved, her view will be replaced by the Netherlands’ largest-ever data center.
Meta’s data center is “too big for a small town like Zeewolde,” says Schaap, who has become one of the project’s biggest rivals. “There are already 200 data centers in the Netherlands, and this move would bring huge areas of farmland to just one company,” she argues, “which is not fair.”
Like Schaap, the other residents of Zeewolde are outraged that Meta has chosen their town as the first giant data center in the Netherlands. They claim the company will be allowed to suck up a large percentage of the country’s renewable energy supply to power Meta’s pornography, conspiracy theories and likes on Meta’s social platforms.
Their attitude reflects a broader shift against Big Tech’s plans to flock to the Netherlands, one of the three main hubs for data centers in Europe along with the UK and Germany, making the matter a reality. a national debate ahead of local elections later this year.
Amsterdam is home to a major internet exchange, which distributes traffic from nearby data centers, and it has attracted tech giants looking for better connectivity and setting up hubs. massive data, “super speed” to process their own data nearby.
Microsoft built the first hyperscale in the Netherlands in 2015. Since then, two more have been built and that number is expected to grow, according to the trade group Dutch Data Center Association. But Meta’s plan for the Zeewolde site, called Tractor field 4, is the largest to date. It will span 166 hectares, the equivalent of more than 1,300 Olympic swimming pools, and will consume 1,380 gigawatts of energy per year, at least double that of the city’s 22,000 residents. consume in the same time period.
The fate of Tractor Field 4 sparked protests and led 5,000 people to sign the petition. Schaap has set up an official organization — Sichting DataTruc — to give the voice of locals more weight to the council. Different groups have different concerns, but each insists that it is not opposed to data centers. “We’re not against data centers,” says Caroline de Roos of biodiversity group Land von Ons. “What we’re against is this great, really great use of farm space for the data center or any industry. What a waste of arable land.” For Schaap, size matters. “It’s not the right proportions,” she said. “70% of the respondents [in a recent survey] against a super intense like this, because it’s so big, it demands too much of our electricity, it demands too much of our water. “
Zeewolde residents’ argument that the data center will take from the community without generating much profit is exacerbated by what they know about Meta’s social media empire. At the top of the Facebook page Schaap set up to protest the plan is a sketch by cartoonist Ronald Oudman, showing five buildings towering over the flat Dutch countryside. Each page is embellished with a label that says “PORNO, FAKE NEWS, SILLY CHATS, LIKES AND COMMENT, and THEORY EXPRESSED.” “It has nothing to do with medical apps for hospitals or banking apps, it’s for nothing but entertainment,” Schaap said. “We don’t get too much out of all of this. [Meta] talk about community programs and social benefits. But it was just a big joke, because it would be peanuts compared to what we gave them.”
