Governing the environmental externalities of digital infrastructure: A multi‐regime legal assessment of data centres

Abstract The rapid expansion of data centres and their environmental impacts, including high energy and water consumption and land‐use changes, pose urgent challenges to existing regulatory systems. These impacts exhibit a distinctive ‘hybrid‐point source pollution’ character, originating from a physically discrete facility yet producing dispersed, cumulative and cross‐sectoral environmental consequences that evade existing regulatory classifications. A comparative study of the EU, the US and China shows that, despite their governance models being characterised, respectively, as norm‐anchored, market‐oriented and policy‐directed, all suffer from fragmented regulation and insufficient integration of environmental issues. At the international level, existing environmental treaties provide only partial and largely non‐binding coverage, leaving major legal gaps. Dealing with these deficiencies requires a comprehensive governance framework that strengthens environmental assessment, includes spatial planning, optimises regulatory tools and establishes unified standards and disclosure mechanisms, thereby advancing a cross‐border model that connects environmental, international and digital law.