European Union: European Commission opened consultation on Cloud and AI Development Act including data governance measures

On 9 April 2025, the European Commission opened a public consultation on the proposed Cloud and AI Development Act until 4 June 2025. The Act aims to create the conditions for the EU to incentivise large investments in cloud and edge capacity. It addresses obstacles to building data centres, with a view to at least tripling the EU's data centre capacity within the next five to seven years and bringing it to a level that meets the needs of EU businesses and public administrations by 2035. The Act aims to ensure that data centre projects meeting requirements related to resource efficiency (including energy and water efficiency), circularity, and innovation will benefit from simplified permitting while maintaining environmental safeguards. For highly critical use cases, including AI applications, the Act aims to ensure that the public and private sectors in the EU can rely on highly secure EU-based cloud capacity. Additionally, the Act will look into establishing a common EU marketplace for cloud capacity and services to enable the entry of a more diverse set of cloud service providers.