Data-center law in Austria

National jurisdiction · as of 2026-09-06

Austria's Umweltvertraglichkeitsprufungsgesetz 2000 (UVP-G 2000) subjects a project to mandatory environmental impact assessment only if it falls within a closed list of project types in the Act's Annex 1; a data center is not one of the listed types, so building one triggers no UVP obligation regardless of its scale, energy draw, or water use.

A large data center is instead approved through the ordinary sectoral permitting regime: a building permit under the relevant Land's Bauordnung, and, where the project draws groundwater or surface water for cooling or discharges water back to a watercourse, a water-use permit under the federal Wasserrechtsgesetz 1959 (WRG 1959).

No federal land-use, energy-grid, construction, air-operations, or incentives statute drafted specifically for data centers, and no federal incentive regime targeted at computing infrastructure, was located in the sources checked.

Instruments on record

1 instrument on record, grouped by the family of approval each one governs.

Water and utilities

Who commits water and sewer service, and under what assessment?

Wasserrechtsgesetz 1959, Sections 9 and 10, Water-Use Permit Requirement

In force

WRG 1959 Sec. 9-10, BGBl. Nr. 215/1959 as amended

Applies to both

Section 9(1) requires a water-rights authority's permit for any use of a public watercourse beyond ordinary common use, and for building or altering a facility used for that purpose; Section 9(2) extends a permit requirement to a private watercourse where the use could affect a third party's rights or the water's flow, character, or level, or risk flooding or waterlogging another's land.

Section 10 lets a landowner draw groundwater for ordinary household and business needs without a permit only where extraction is proportionate to the owner's own land and uses hand-operated equipment; every other groundwater development or use, and the construction or alteration of a facility serving it, requires a water-rights permit, and an artesian well always requires one.

A data center's cooling-water withdrawal from a river or aquifer, or its discharge of water back to a watercourse, falls within this permit requirement rather than under the UVP-G's environmental impact assessment, since the UVP-G's Annex 1 lists no data-center project category.

Source: Full text of law

Every entry cites the instrument it describes. None of it is legal advice: verify a citation before relying on it. Full sourcing: read the methodology. The rest of the record: all jurisdictions.