OpenAI will publish data centre water and power by site; in the EU those figures stay confidential

In one sentence: OpenAI promises to publish, campus by campus, the water and electricity use of its future US data centres; in the EU, the same figures already go to a European database every year, and governments can see them, but a resident cannot look up the site next door.

On 5 November 2026 OpenAI published two documents: a National Community Compact, setting out what it commits to around its compute campuses, and a Compute Campus Policy Blueprint, the rules it wants US lawmakers to impose on the whole industry. It came two days after the midterm elections, in which voters backed restrictions or rejected pro-development measures in all but one of 41 local ballot measures on data centres across 10 states, according to CNBC and Ballotpedia. Le Latent compared these pledges with what EU law already requires from data centres in Europe. More coverage of AI regulation is in our Society section.

What OpenAI promises, and where

The commitments apply to “every future compute campus OpenAI owns and operates”, OpenAI writes in its announcement. The compact speaks of communities “across America” and does not mention Europe. Each campus will have its own local compact, with a common core:

• water: a plan for each campus, priority to closed-loop or low-water cooling, and public reporting of water use “by location”, in other words site by site;
• electricity: OpenAI says it will pay the full cost of the power and grid infrastructure it needs, provide financial assurances before major spending, and publish on-site electricity use, including electricity generated and consumed;
• neighbours: published construction plans (traffic, noise, lighting) and independent noise studies before operations begin, then every year;
• public officials: no non-disclosure agreements required, with only narrow exceptions for security information and trade secrets;
• jobs: a published hiring strategy and an annual report on hiring and apprenticeships.

OpenAI already cites sums: $80 million committed to community priorities in Effingham County, Georgia, and $40 million in Pike County, Ohio, according to the compact. In Effingham, its agreement with Georgia Power lets the utility cut the power it delivers to the campus by up to 1,000 megawatts at times of high demand, the announcement says. The blueprint asks lawmakers to turn such obligations into rules for every developer, arguing that voluntary commitments are only a starting point.

In the EU, reporting already exists; site-level publication does not

Under Article 12 of the Energy Efficiency Directive (EU) 2023/1791, member states must require owners and operators of data centres with installed IT power demand of at least 500 kW to make the information in Annex VII publicly available every year: name, owner, location, installed power and key performance indicators, including energy and water use, as the Commission report summarises. In practice, that information goes into a European database whose content is published only in aggregate form.

Delegated Regulation (EU) 2024/1364 of 14 March 2024 settled the point. Operators report the previous year’s figures every year, the first time by 15 September 2024 and then by 15 May, according to the Commission report. The database publishes aggregates by member state and for the EU, and the Commission and member states, which see every record, must keep individual data confidential under Article 5(5); the report itself was prepared from anonymised data for that reason. DG Energy describes the public side as an online dashboard of aggregated data, updated monthly.

France is a useful worked example of how a member state applies this. The rules sit in Articles L. 236-1 to L. 236-3 of the French Energy Code, with checks and penalties, and the French Ministry for the Ecological Transition states that the individual data submitted are not meant to be disclosed. Data centres account for 2.2% of French electricity consumption, and the French energy agency ADEME expects that figure to grow by a factor of 3.7 by 2035, according to the same ministry page. Other countries add their own layer: Germany sets its national reporting threshold at 300 kW, the Commission report notes.

Sources: OpenAI compact, Commission report and DG Energy, read on 13 November 2026.

What the aggregated EU figures show

The Commission report of 21 September 2026 (COM(2026) 500) is the first assessment of the database. In the first reporting period, 770 data centres submitted data, around 36% of the estimated total required to report; six member states reported none. EU data centres consumed 68 TWh of electricity in 2024, a figure expected to reach 114 TWh by 2030, or 3.2% of EU electricity demand.

On water, the average water usage effectiveness (WUE, water supplied per MWh of IT energy) was 0.58 m³/MWh in 2024, ranging from 0.07 to 1.28 across member states, based on 458 data centres whose values were deemed reliable, according to the same report. Roughly half of reporting data centres exceed a recommended baseline of 1.5 for power usage effectiveness (PUE) and/or 0.4 for WUE. For the second period, the Commission says it has already received preliminary data from at least 30% more data centres.

Next step: a public rating label for each data centre

On the same day the Commission put forward a common rating scheme. It will cover individual data centres above 500 kW, with transparent information on the energy and water they actually use, and the first labels are expected in 2027, according to its announcement. The act is first subject to a two-month scrutiny period by the European Parliament and the Council. The report says the label’s indicators were chosen among those already reported “while also respecting confidentiality concerns”. It will be a rating, not necessarily the cubic metres and megawatt hours that OpenAI promises.

The Commission is also preparing minimum performance standards for data centres. The public consultation is open until 14 December 2026 and the proposal is planned for the second quarter of 2027, says the DG Energy page. These are the rules that could set limits on water and energy, not just reporting duties; for the wider EU rulebook on AI, see our EU AI Act timeline.

What it changes, for whom, what to do

If you are a local councillor, resident or campaigner facing a data centre project in Europe, OpenAI’s compact will not apply to you, but it gives you a list of questions a US operator has agreed to answer in public. An operator of a 500 kW-plus site already reports its energy and water every year: asking it to publish those figures for the site means asking for what it already sends to the authorities. On water, the blueprint is precise: separate the initial cooling-system fill from ongoing use, water withdrawn from water consumed, and estimates from measured data. For how public consultation works on such a project in France, see our case study of the AWS data centre at Tigery (in French).

If you want a say in EU rules, the Commission’s consultation on minimum standards is open to anyone until 14 December 2026, from the DG Energy page. Other live EU consumer files touching AI include the Digital Fairness Act proposal.

If you use ChatGPT in Europe, nothing changes: the compact is about US building sites. It does frame a debate Europe will have too, as the EU aims to triple its data centre capacity by 2035, according to the Commission. How your own data is handled is a separate question, covered in our guide to objecting to AI training on your personal data.

What we do not know yet

OpenAI gives no date for its first reports and no list of the campuses concerned. Data centres that partners build and run for it are not mentioned in the compact, which covers only campuses “owned and operated by OpenAI”. On the EU side, the rating scheme is not yet in force, and the exact content of the public label remains to be seen in 2027.