Cristian Fàbrega Gallego is a professor in the Department of Electronic and Biomedical Engineering and coordinates the master's degree in renewable energies and energy sustainability at the University of Barcelona. He speaks to ARA to explain the environmental impact and energy consumption of artificial intelligence data centers, which are multiplying around the world.

In mid-June, United States President Donald Trump issued an order that seemed unthinkable: after weeks of tensions with Anthropic, the company that created the artificial intelligence model Claude, the Oval Office forced them to close their most advanced tools, Mythos and Fable, to any user who was not North American. Although the blockade has already been resolved, experts and markets are still trembling: Trump then demonstrated that he has his finger on the "on and off switch" for global technologies, comments Miquel Martí, executive director of Tech Barcelona. The temporary detention at Anthropic was irrefutable proof of the evidence that Europe, like so many other international players, does not control its digital and technological future, nor its present.

Catalonia continues to expand its computing capacity to tackle the advance of artificial intelligence. The company Submer Group, based in Barcelona, will invest more than 1 billion euros to install a new data center in Flix (Ribera d'Ebre). The technological infrastructure will be located on the grounds of the former Ercros chemical plant. The center, as the company assured in a statement, will be "sustainable and state-of-the-art," and will dedicate its activity to boosting investment in AI-based applications and services.

The Government has taken a new step to promote the implementation of data centers in Catalonia and has identified 26 potential projects that would sum up to nearly 2,000 megawatts (MW) of power. "More specifically, there are about ten of these projects that have a high degree of maturity that could reach a power of between 300 and 500 MW progressively between 2030 and 2035", stated the Minister of the Presidency, Albert Dalmau, who this Tuesday chaired the second meeting of the Institutional Board for the Promotion of Data Centers. In parallel, the Generalitat has established up to seven poles for the implementation of data centers in Catalan territory: Parc de l'Alba, Sant Adrià-Barcelonès, l'Anoia, Metropolitan South area, Tarragona, Lleida, and Terres de l'Ebre.

"We'll have good news about that soon," says José Miguel Sánchez, the general manager of the Zaragoza Chamber of Commerce, smiling when asked about the possibility of Aragon surpassing Catalonia in per capita income and moving from being the fifth richest autonomous community in Spain to the fourth. Sánchez is the leading figure of the economic euphoria reigning in Aragon thanks to the influx of millions in investments announced by major American technology companies like Amazon and Microsoft, as well as Blackstone, to build data centers. So far, some thirty have already been announced. The figures are staggering, but depending on the specific investment, we're talking about sums of money that exceed Aragon's current GDP, which stands at 49 billion euros. "This is Aragon's moment," declares Sánchez from his office in the Chamber's historic headquarters, located next to the construction site of the Nueva Romareda stadium, one of the football stadiums vying to host matches of the 2030 World Cup.

The construction of a data center to serve TikTok has raised many eyebrows in Finland. In recent years, the construction of this type of infrastructure, which is key to the functioning of the internet, has boomed in the Nordic country, thanks to access to low-cost electricity, good connectivity, and a cold climate that allows servers to be cooled. However, data centers also raise important questions about the security of the data they store, their energy consumption, and the low economic impact they generate for the site that hosts them.

US President Donald Trump has ordered the country's independent nuclear regulatory commission to reduce regulations and speed up the process of granting new licenses for reactors and power plants. The goal is to reduce the process to eighteen months.