The European Union is pressing tech companies to open up the numbers on the environmental footprint of their mega data centres. The argument is simple. The director of the European Environment Agency, Leena Ylä-Mononen, put it in one sentence: "What you can't measure, you can't manage."

Why is the problem exploding now? Because the EU plans to triple data-centre capacity in seven years in order to stay competitive in the development of artificial intelligence. Today, data centres consume around 3 percent of the Union's total electricity. In Ireland that has already reached 20 percent - and that is what Brussels is trying to avoid at the EU level.

And here comes the paradox. Only 36 percent of the data centres legally obliged to report on energy efficiency have actually done so. The rest hide behind a confidentiality clause that, according to European sources, was inserted after lobbying by US tech giants including Microsoft. The result: 64 percent of the biggest electricity consumers do not have to say how much they use.

The regional examples are instructive. In Ireland, a fresh report from Friends of the Earth Ireland showed that data centres last year consumed 22 percent of total electricity - more than all urban households combined. According to the study, they drained 715 million euros from the Irish economy and added 360 euros to the average household bill between 2015 and 2023. In other words, Irish families have been quietly paying a "hidden tax" through electricity bills - for infrastructure that belongs to corporations.

In the neighbourhood, the data centre in Kragujevac currently consumes 123 GWh a year, or 25 percent of the city's total consumption. Once fully expanded to 56 MW, it will use as much electricity as all of Kragujevac without it. That is 1-1.4 percent of Serbia's total annual electricity output. A country that has just shifted from being an exporter to an importer of electricity, in winter, does not have the luxury of ignoring these numbers.

For Macedonia this is a direct signal. If the EU introduces strict environmental rules for data centres (and that is happening by 2030), our energy resources need to be ready to withstand that pressure. The question is whether the government has a strategy for the energy mix, or whether we will wait until problems are already here - the same way it played out with wastewater treatment. The numbers are already speaking. Over the next 4 years, every decision on a data centre becomes a critical decision for the energy balance.