Microsoft and other US tech firms pushed the EU to classify individual datacentre emissions data as confidential, and the EU adopted that demand almost verbatim into official rules — blocking public access to environmental metrics and hiding the pollution from AI infrastructure. The Guardian investigation documents the lobbying with industry emails and shows the confidentiality clause is now being used to refuse public records requests, though legal scholars warn it may violate EU transparency law and international environmental conventions. This matters because datacentres powering AI chatbots burn fossil fuel to run, and without individual site data, researchers and regulators can only see aggregated national numbers — making it impossible to scrutinize which companies are the worst polluters or pressure them to switch to cleaner power. The broader pattern: tech firms that spent a decade marketing themselves as climate leaders have gone quiet on emissions as AI infrastructure demands explode.