Protesters breach Microsoft data center construction site in Amsterdam

• Activists entered the construction site, climbed a crane and occupied the unfinished building’s roof.
• Pure DC, the developer, says the campus was fully leased with power and permits secured; Microsoft is to take all its server capacity.
• Government records acknowledge pressure on other developments, but say the project falls outside national restrictions on hyperscale data centers.

Dozens of pro-Palestinian activists breached the fences of a data center construction site intended for Microsoft in Amsterdam on Friday, November 6. The occupation brought a campaign to stop construction inside a development whose builder has pledged more than €1 billion in investment.

The dispute joins objections to the electricity demands of new data centers with allegations about Microsoft’s military customers. The software and cloud services company is to use all the campus’s server capacity, according to the Dutch government’s parliamentary reply. But the available evidence does not establish what data this unfinished site will hold, or whether Friday’s occupation will change its construction schedule.

Company-reported design: Pure DC’s CGI rendering of the planned AMS01 campus in Amsterdam Westpoort. Image: Pure DC. Source: Pure DC.

Two groups, a breached perimeter

Activists including members of the protest group Geef Tegengas entered the Sloterdijk site before a separate noon demonstration organized by Fossielvrij NL. Demonstrators climbed a construction crane and sat on the roof, according to the on-site account. Roughly 100 to 150 Fossielvrij NL demonstrators stood outside; it was unclear whether their planned protest would proceed.

Fossielvrij NL, a campaign group calling for a halt to new data centers, had announced its support for Geef Tegengas’s action. It argued that people should first have a democratic say over where AI is used, then assess how many data centers are needed. The two gatherings therefore shared a cause, although they were distinct groups in the on-site reporting.

An earlier dispatch identified Geef Tegengas as the organizer of an attempt by about 100 activists to reach the Plimsollweg building site and halt construction. Police surrounded them on Basisweg at about 11 a.m. and used batons to hold them back. Around 11:15 a.m., police announced that demonstrators’ belongings could be confiscated on the mayor’s authority; activists then tried to break through the police line.

The local live account recorded police using pepper spray and demonstrators entering the site from several directions. The attendance estimates describe different groups and stages, and cannot safely be added together.

Geef Tegengas had already occupied the site in June, according to earlier reporting. That campaign also drew Extinction Rebellion, which staged a nighttime action, the earlier dispatch said.

A planned billion-euro campus with an existing power contract

Pure Data Centres Group, or Pure DC, is the British developer and operator building the campus for cloud and AI computing. It had pursued similar large projects before this launch: a March 2025 regulatory announcement described it as owned by Oaktree and announced a joint venture to develop a 56 MW data center in London.

In its December 2025 Amsterdam announcement, Pure DC said it would invest more than €1 billion in the Westpoort campus, designated AMS01. That is a development commitment, rather than evidence that the entire sum has been spent. The company said the campus was fully leased, with permits and power secured and a private substation already live. It acquired the land on a long leasehold from the Port of Amsterdam.

Pure DC’s design calls for three 85-metre towers, each housing 26 MW of data halls. It projected more than 1,000 direct development jobs and about 80 permanent skilled jobs once complete. Those are company forecasts.

An April 2026 government reply to parliament, drawing on provincial information, put the electrical connection capacity at 33 MW per tower, or 99 MW in total. Connection capacity and the developer’s data-hall figures describe different measures; neither is observed annual electricity use.

The government calculated that continuous demand at 99 MW would require about 0.87 terawatt-hours a year. That is a full-load illustration, not a forecast of this campus’s consumption.

For national context, Statistics Netherlands’ provisional 2024 figures show electricity deliveries to Dutch data centers of about 5.1 TWh, or 4.6% of national electricity consumption. Deliveries rose 37% from 2021, slower than the 58% rise between 2018 and 2021. The statistics count connections where data center operation is the main activity, excluding in-house facilities at institutions such as hospitals and universities.

The government explicitly acknowledged that the Amsterdam project takes space and grid transport capacity and therefore affects other developments. It said the project had contracted capacity before congestion was declared and a queue established. The exact contract date was not public; the government inferred that the contracts dated from around the 2019 building application. Its explanation was an earlier contractual entitlement, rather than a specific government decision to put Microsoft ahead of housing.

The building permit preceded national restrictions. An appeal against the environmental permits remained underway when the government replied to parliament in April 2026. Source: Dutch parliamentary record.

Why national restrictions did not stop construction

The permitting history is more specific than a claim that a large project simply bypassed a ban. The government said a building permit was granted on November 6, 2020, following a December 2019 application. Provincial environmental permits for the three towers followed in July 2025. As of the April reply, an appeal against those environmental permits was still underway.

National restrictions apply to data centers with more than 10 hectares of built floor area and connection capacity of at least 70 MW. The government put this project’s combined built floor area at 2.2 hectares, below the area threshold despite its electrical capacity.

Computable’s June report characterized the separate permits for three towers as a way of evading the national ban. The government’s earlier explanation directly disputes that mechanism: the combined area of all three towers was below the threshold, so splitting the buildings was not decisive. It said an equivalent new application would also fall outside the national rules.

That does not settle the policy question. The government shared concerns about grid pressure and said it would examine whether additional rules were needed for future cases. It placed responsibility for this project’s planning and permits with Amsterdam and the province of North Holland. It also defended investment in data centers as essential to digital infrastructure and competitiveness, while acknowledging a gap between industry demand and available space and energy.

Surveillance concerns, without proof about this site

The action group’s statement reproduced in the local live account accused Microsoft of enabling oppression through services for the Israeli military and US immigration agency ICE. Those are the campaign’s allegations, rather than evidence identifying this campus’s future workloads.

There is a documented history behind the surveillance concern. In a September 2025 statement, Microsoft said its ongoing review had found evidence supporting elements of reporting about Israeli military surveillance, including Israeli defense ministry consumption of Netherlands storage capacity on Azure, Microsoft’s cloud platform, and use of AI services.

Microsoft said it had disabled specified storage and AI services for a unit within Israel’s defense ministry, while continuing other cybersecurity work for Israel. The company said its review examined its own business records without accessing the customer’s content, and that its terms prohibited mass surveillance of civilians.

In April, the Dutch government said it did not know what data Microsoft planned to store at the Amsterdam campus. Customers were not required to report their intended data or uses of server capacity to Dutch authorities. Citing Microsoft’s service shutdown, the government considered the same surveillance use unlikely; that was its assessment, not a disclosure of the new site’s customers or workloads.

What would establish whether the campaign has stopped the project

In its response to the on-site report, Microsoft said it respected peaceful expression but disapproved of unlawful actions or conduct endangering people’s safety. The available reporting at the November 6 research cutoff, 12:05 UTC, did not establish how long the occupation would last or whether construction would be delayed.

A lasting change would require evidence beyond entry to the site: a revised construction schedule, a developer decision or an intervention by the authorities responsible for its permits. The April record also leaves the later outcome of the environmental-permit appeal unresolved. The occupation is established; its effect on a permitted, contracted development remains to be demonstrated.