The Government is negotiating with five to six potential investors over data centres in Macedonia. Not a single name has been published. Not a single condition has been published. How much water and how much electricity they would consume - that has not been published either.

That is the factual situation the political argument is being conducted around, and it is reason enough for a question regardless of who is asking it. Maja Borozan of SDSM put it sharply: Prime Minister Hristijan Mickoski speaks publicly about an open and transparent process while simultaneously admitting that the Government is negotiating behind closed doors. "Macedonia has no resources for experiments behind closed doors. Especially not with water," she said at a press conference.

What a data centre demands

Data centres are not factories with thousands of employees. They are facilities that consume enormous amounts of electricity and, depending on the cooling technology, significant amounts of water. That is their nature, not a political claim.

VMRO-DPMNE rejects the criticism. MP Mile Lefkov said the opposition is spreading panic, pointing out that Macedonia functions as a market economy and that the way the electricity price is formed is clear. On water, he stated that different cooling technologies exist, depending on what the centres are for.

That answer is accurate and at the same time does not answer the question. That different technologies exist is a fact. Which technologies will be applied in the specific projects with the specific investors - that is what nobody is saying, since neither the investors nor the conditions have been published.

The Government's plan is bigger than the argument

Meanwhile, in Berovo, Mickoski presented a broader concept: a primary national data centre linking state institutions, with the existing capacity in Prilep as the secondary one, that is, a disaster recovery centre. The plan also includes a national cloud system for data backups.

That direction was not invented at home. The European Commission's assessment of the Macedonian Reform Agenda provides for examining the possibility of developing centralised government digital infrastructure and a secure data and cloud centre with backup recovery systems.

The Prime Minister also stated that the number of employed people grew by around 17,000 between 2024 and 2026, from approximately 691,000 to 708,000, citing State Statistical Office data. That is a change in the number of employed people - the formulation that the Government "created" those jobs is a political assessment, not a statistical conclusion.

The same goes for the figure that interest in engineering disciplines has grown by 30 percent. Mickoski himself says he got the number from his own Faculty of Mechanical Engineering. That is one faculty, not every engineering faculty in the country.

A data centre is neither a miracle nor a catastrophe. It is an infrastructure facility with a known cost in resources and a known benefit. The only thing that decides the balance is whether both sides of that equation are published before signing - and that is exactly what is missing right now.