As anyone interested in technology is well aware by now, there is a serious competitiveness problem in Europe compared to countries such as the U.S. and China. In Italy, in particular, this condition is complex and could become very impactful in the coming years.
Europe produces very few technologies, which has been solved by buying software and hardware solutions from abroad. We have very famous manufacturers such as Huawei, Samsung, Cisco, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, but we have no significant realities in the ‘old continent’; if we decided to add artificial intelligence to this scenario, the result would get worse. Both technicians and politicians have spoken about this phenomenon: Draghi, during the presentation of the European Competitiveness Report (2024) had clearly said:
The fact is that Europe has had the wrong focus. We have turned inward, seeing our competitors among ourselves, even in areas like defence and energy where we have deep common interests.
A further insight can be found in this article, in which Draghi’s speech was related to political and technological dynamics in other countries. Well, the situation, if possible, has become even more complicated: in Italy the ‘no data centre’ movements are increasing, as also reported in a very interesting article published by Wired. Italy is not new to movements of this kind, let us see some of them:
- Coldiretti and Slow Food have created an alliance against cultured meat(more).
- The ‘No 5G’ committee was formed to hinder the installation of 5G antennas on health grounds(more).
- PauseAI calls for a halt in the development of large artificial intelligence models worldwide(more).
In short, the scenario is well known to the Italians: faced with a potential source of innovation, all kinds of opposition movements start to grow and clearly this is no different for data centres.
Comfortable and uncomfortable truths
Every country would need its own data centres, because it is with them that the much-vaunted technological national sovereignty can be ensured, which, for those who are unclear about what it means exactly, could be defined as the supreme power of a state to rule autonomously over its own territory and population, without the intervention of others, making use of the technologies in its possession. Technological national sovereignty is not achieved with words but with concrete facts, including equipping oneself with all the knowledge and equipment necessary to be independent from other countries.
The ‘convenient truth’ is that these technologies certainly present initial problems of integration within the social context: health, environmental and sustainability issues are therefore investigated, but despite the best precautions, physiological residual risks may remain. For some social movements, it is more comfortable to exclude their use or, at best, to limit their use to ‘better times’. The problem with this approach is that it is often employed even after the aforementioned checks have been carried out, with due verification and safety certifications by universities and independent institutes, to prove its real and effective sustainability. The case of 5G is one of these: for which continuous tests, continuous in-depth investigations, continuous environmental and health sustainability checks are called for.
The inconvenient truth is that there is hardly any ‘time’ to stop these technologies. Controls are put in place but certainly not obsessively. Competition between countries is high, frenetic but at the same time important: a country dependent on the technologies of others is a country whose national technological sovereignty cannot be claimed at the same time. The choice of not having a leading technology such as artificial intelligence, risks seriously compromising the strategic set-up of many discoveries dependent on it: if Italy wants to accept being autonomous and competitive, it must agree to implement these technologies as quickly as possible. Italy is lagging far behind abroad; no one wants an indiscriminate and unchecked implementation, but neither do they want a swirling and constant contrary movement.
An example: the no data centre in Bollate
Yes, data centres consume energy, we have discussed this in a number of articles on this portal, including this one:
It goes without saying that the creation of data centres should be accompanied by energy containment and optimisation policies, but could also develop new technologies for production and savings that we do not have today but need. A country with few data centres cannot cope with the growing technological demands that bring, for example, the much-loved scientific breakthroughs in the fields of medicine.
Who opposes?
Legambiente, for example, has officially taken a position against the establishment of a data centre in Bollate. According to the statement by Legambiente Circolo di Bollate, with the collaboration ofscientific expert Damiano Di Simine, among other reasons there would be:
- Downsizing of an importantecological gateway and a useful area to mitigate the pollution produced by the A52.
- further land consumption; another green area will be sacrificed, in a context in which Bollate is already 38 per cent cemented, one of the highest rates in Lombardy. It is true that for the past 40 years this area has had an artisanal commercial urban destination that it has miraculously escaped until now. But today, all the more so with the added need to mitigate the impacts of the new motorway artery, there is an urgent need to revise that outdated forecast, rather than implement it.
- uninterruptible power supplies that have to be tested every day and are expected to emit pollutants (they will probably be diesel-fuelled).
- powerful energy consumption (the data centre is expected to consume energy equivalent to that of the entire city of Bollate).
To be fair to Legambiente Bollate, we publish the 3-page communiqué in which Legambiente gives its reasons.
About Dr Simine, the ‘Festa del Bio’ portal reads:
He lives in Milan with his wife and three children. Scientific director of Legambiente Lombardia, he has a PhD in food biotechnology. A Legambiente activist since the early 1990s, he has long been involved in protected areas and the protection of the Alps. From 2000 to 2006 he was president of the Italian representation of Cipra, the International Commission for the Protection of the Alps, of which he is now a member of the international board; a member of Legambiente’s national secretariat, with responsibility for soil protection, until 2015 he was also president of the association’s Lombardy committee. He is the creator and coordinator of the European ‘People4soil’ campaign to demand and obtain a European legislative framework that recognises soil as a common good. He is the national head of soil policies at Legambiente.
As of the date of this article, he is on the Executive Board of Legambiente Lombardia.
On the occasion of the opposition to the Bollate data centre, Dr Di Simine had issued a statement, which is reproduced in full:
Once again, even in an area of great urban congestion such as that of the first metropolitan belt, the choice has been made to occupy one of the few surviving green areas in order to carry out important works that could instead be better located on disused areas, thus contributing to the reclamation of the territory: it cannot go unnoticed that there are disused areas in the area that have been waiting for decades for a decisive reclamation operation. Valuable agricultural areas are being devastated and degraded areas are being left to their fate, in a clear picture of a lack of metropolitan direction of territorial transformations.
Conclusions
From nuclear power to transport lines, from artificial intelligence to data centres, in Italy there is a continuous opposition to any form of innovation, not to mention criticism of the enslavement to technologies and solutions from abroad. The problem is that without data centres there is no digital and without digital there is no independent progress; this means that technological solutions will only and exclusively arrive if the supplier countries want them and in the quantity and measure imposed on Italy. This, among other things, without taking into account a very complicated geopolitical context that is transforming old alliances and collaborations into scenarios with greater asperity and uncertainty. Sometimes, instead of saying‘no‘, we should consider the‘how‘ because this would make the activity more constructive and less impactful.
