A single Microsoft data centre in Noord-Holland gobbled up roughly 1% of all the electricity used in the Netherlands last year, newly published government figures reveal.
That figure comes from the RVO (Netherlands Enterprise Agency), the government body that hands out permits and subsidies to businesses.
The agency now keeps tabs on power-hungry warehouses full of servers too. And for the first time, we can see in black and white how much juice one of these giants draws.
So how much power are we talking about?
Picture a cluster of connected sheds along the A7 motorway, near the village of Middenmeer. Last year that one site burned through 1.17 terawatt hours of electricity.
The whole of the Netherlands got through a little over 112 TWh in 2025, based on preliminary CBS (Statistics Netherlands) figures reported by NOS. Meaning, this one data centre accounts for roughly 1% of the national total.
However, Microsoft isn’t the only giant with data centres in the Netherlands. In fact, it’s not even the largest.
Why can we see Microsoft’s number but not Google’s?
Google runs two enormous data centres here, one near Middenmeer and one in the Eemshaven up in Groningen. However, it refuses to publish what they use.
A Google spokesperson tells the NRC that the company treats the power draw of individual sites as competitively sensitive information it would rather keep to itself.
For years, the Netherlands had no idea how much these places consumed, because operators simply kept the numbers quiet.
But a European rule has cracked that open. Since 2024, the EED (Energy Efficiency Directive) requires data centre operators to be upfront about their energy and water use.
Microsoft is the first big American player to actually disclose meaningful details, which is why we know its number and not Google’s.
Guzzling more and more power
What we do know, however, is that data centres already made up 4.6% of national electricity use in 2024, according to CBS. Grid operators expect that to climb towards 15% by 2030.
The Netherlands is already running out of room on its electricity network, a problem known as netcongestie (grid congestion).
Every megawatt handed to a server hall is one that can’t go to a new home or business.
With the network already so full that some regions have paused new connections entirely, the arrival of ever more server halls is turning into a real scrap over a shrinking pie.
Do you reckon the Netherlands should cap how much power these data centres can guzzle, or is this just the price of the internet age? Tell us in the comments.
