Datacentre Workers in Europe: Injuries and Unpaid Pay

Migrant workers on datacentre sites in Sweden, Norway, Belgium and the Netherlands face debilitating injuries, squalid living conditions and unpaid wages, according to a five-month investigation published on 30 October 2026 by The Guardian and Investigate Europe. The report also describes exploitative employment practices and an infectious outbreak that, it says, went unreported.

The investigation describes the case of Sandu, a 34-year-old electrical tester. In March he suffered an arc-flash electrocution, a sudden electrical discharge, at the Google datacentre in Saint-Ghislain, Belgium, while testing electrical wiring. The current involved 400 volts and 12,000 amps. It burned 12% of his body, including second-degree burns to his face and neck and third-degree burns to his right shoulder and fingers. He was placed in an induced coma, a deliberate state of unconsciousness, for five days at Grand Hopital de Charleroi.

Dornan Engineering, an Irish company, oversaw the contractor that employed him at the Saint-Ghislain site. The local labour inspectorate, the public body that checks workplace conditions, closed its investigation into the accident in late October and found no wrongdoing.

The scale of the industry is large. Europe has more than 2,300 datacentres, including at least 500 in the UK, and hundreds more are under construction, according to the Guardian's reporting.

The sector is also drawing scrutiny over its environmental footprint. On 29 October 2026, Finland opened a criminal investigation into Google's clearing of forest for a datacentre. Finnish authorities allege that Google may have breached Finnish environmental laws by skipping a required environmental impact assessment, a study of a project's likely effects on nature.

Secrecy around that footprint is another point of dispute. In April 2026, Le Monde reported that Microsoft and the tech industry lobby had secured an EU provision, a clause within EU law, that keeps environmental data about the datacentres they operate secret. In May, members of the European Parliament called on the European Commission to scrap that secrecy, following Investigate Europe's revelations about a Big Tech lobbying campaign.