Protesters Break Into a Microsoft Data Center Site in Amsterdam as Europe Turns on AI Buildouts

On Friday, protesters pushed through a fence on the edge of Amsterdam, swarmed the construction site of a new Microsoft data center and climbed one of its cranes. By the end of the day, a project the city could no longer approve under its own rules had become the face of a Europe-wide fight over AI infrastructure.

About 100 people made it onto the site, a Reuters witness said, while organizers put the number far higher. Up on the crane, activists unfurled a banner telling AI, in less polite words, to get lost, and another reading "Microsoft powers genocide." Below, the crowd chanted "Microsoft has got to go" and "free Palestine," The Verge reports.

A march the mayor had banned

The day did not start on the site. Police first stopped the march, and the mayor banned the demonstration outright. Protesters then tried to break through the police line, riot police moved in near Sloterdijk, and several people were arrested.

Hundreds more never got past the fence. They stayed outside as smoke bombs went off and the banners went up on the crane, according to Futurism.

The action was organized in part by Geef Tegengas, a Rotterdam climate justice group built around direct action. It told local broadcaster AT5 that about 500 people entered the site.

A project the city banned, still going up

The plans call for three towers, each 85 meters tall, built by British developer Pure Data Centres with Microsoft as the sole tenant. Amsterdam has banned new data centers until 2030. This one keeps moving because its plans were filed as far back as 2016, before the ban, and it got a provincial allowance in January.

Geef Tegengas says the finished site will use as much electricity as every household in Amsterdam combined, and that it will slow the building of 30,000 new homes in a city already short on housing. Spokesperson Roos Molenaar said the group will not accept Amsterdam being used for AI slop and to facilitate genocide, describing a data center gulping drinking water to make the rich richer.

Microsoft had not commented on the protest.

Not just Amsterdam

The break-in was one stop in two days of data center actions planned across Europe on November 6 and 7. The same week, activists set up a mock Israeli military checkpoint outside a Microsoft data center in Dublin. Microsoft's Amsterdam campus was already a target in July, when Extinction Rebellion hit it with balloons filled with acetic acid and paint.

The anger is not confined to Europe either. Days earlier, American voters backed bans or limits on data centers in nearly every local ballot measure in the midterms, and the backlash helped flip two governorships.

In the US, the fight over power, water and land is playing out at the ballot box. In Amsterdam on Friday, it played out on top of a crane.

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