The EU Is Building a Mandatory Rating Label for Data Centres

The European Commission opened a call for feedback on 27 March 2026 on a draft delegated regulation setting rules for rating data centres. The consultation ran four weeks and closed on 23 April. The draft supplements Directive (EU) 2023/1791, the recast Energy Efficiency Directive, and amends Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2024/1364, which created the European database on data centres in March 2024.

Ratings would use power usage effectiveness and water usage effectiveness classes, based on indices calculated according to Annex I of the draft. Electronic labels are to be generated automatically by the European database by 15 August 2027 and every year thereafter, valid from 15 August to 15 August of the following year, for facilities that have submitted the required information and key performance indicators under the 2024 regulation. Facilities with installed IT power demand below 500 kW may participate voluntarily. The scheme also aims to promote renewable energy use and the reuse of waste heat in nearby facilities and heat networks.

The shift this represents is from efficiency as an internal metric to efficiency as a published number. PUE has been a marketing figure for fifteen years, quoted selectively and calculated inconsistently. A rating generated automatically from data submitted to a European database, on a fixed annual cycle, is a different object.

For anyone selling monitoring or DCIM into European facilities, that turns an efficiency argument into a compliance requirement. PUE and WUE have to be measured rather than estimated, which means sub-metering that cleanly separates IT load from facility load — not always trivial in a building that grew incrementally — and water instrumentation that many sites simply do not have. The measurements then have to be logged, retained and submitted in a form that produces a label somebody will read.

The annual 15 August cycle is worth noting on its own. It gives the work a recurring deadline, which is the single most useful property a compliance requirement can have from the point of view of anyone who has to budget for it.