News from Europe’s Digital Gateway: A Proof of Concept for Mapping Data Centre News Coverage

The Netherlands has been described as Europe’s Digital Gateway, owing in part to the disproportionate number of data centres located in the relatively small country. Data centres have become a much-discussed issue in Dutch media, with 11,842 news articles about data centres having been published between 1 January 1990 and 23 January 2023. This study explores this news coverage to identify possible sustainability concerns experienced in society as a result of data centre operation and construction. Identifying such concerns could help in informing discussion and future decisions regarding location, design, and operation of data centres as well as potential measures to mitigate sustainability concerns. This study explores Dutch data centre news coverage by combining manual and automated content analysis to determine commonly discussed themes. The results are subsequently spatialised using GIS software, which was later adapted into a PowerBI tool, allowing for an interactive exploration of the data. Through this exploration, we identify a strong trend towards increased public attention and debate about data centres in the Netherlands, underscored by a significant increase in media coverage since 2020. Most notably, the topic “space” is prominent throughout the entire study period, receiving the highest number of mentions each year and quadrupling in coverage from 2015 to 2021. Furthermore, matters relating to the categories “technology” and “environment” experienced the highest relative growth in the same time period. Overall, our results indicate an increasing importance of data centres in public discourse.