Data-center law in Denmark

National jurisdiction · as of 2026-09-06

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Denmark has no data-center-specific siting, permitting or utility statute; a data center is sited and permitted under the general planning, environmental and grid-connection framework that applies to any large facility, and that general framework is not independently described here.

Denmark's one identified data-center-specific instrument is a tax benefit rather than a permitting duty: Elafgiftsloven section 11(1) lets a VAT-registered business obtain a refund of the electricity tax on the taxable electricity it consumes, except in the cases excluded by paragraph 2 of section 11, and Skatteraadet, the Tax Council, has confirmed in binding rulings made under the earlier wording of section 11 that a business running its own IT equipment at a third-party data-center provider is the consumer of that electricity and can claim the refund, including electricity tax the data-center provider has passed through since 1 January 2017.

Instruments on record

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

Public agreements

What fiscal agreements attach a data center to its host jurisdiction?

Elafgiftsloven Section 11, Electricity Tax Refund for VAT-Registered Businesses

In force

Elafgiftsloven (lov om afgift af elektricitet), Lovbekendtgørelse nr. 1284 af 3. november 2023, section 11, stk. 1

Effective 2021-01-01 · Applies to private

A business registered under the Danish VAT Act can obtain a refund of the electricity tax on the taxable electricity it consumes, except in the cases excluded by paragraph 2 of section 11. The refund is reduced by 0.4 øre per kWh under section 11 c(1), except for a refund granted under section 11(3), second sentence. Section 11(1) took its present wording through Act 2225 of 29 December 2020. That Act entered into force on 1 January 2021.

For businesses listed in annex 1 to the earlier consolidated Act, the rewrite took effect on 1 January 2023. Under the earlier wording of section 11, Skatteraadet, the Danish Tax Council, confirmed in a binding ruling (SKM2018.250.SR) that a business is the consumer, for this purpose, of the electricity used by its own IT equipment even where that equipment is physically located at a third-party data-center provider.

Skatteraadet had separately held (SKM2016.527.SR, restated in SKM2016.571.SKAT) that the data-center provider itself is not the consumer of the electricity its customers' servers draw. Section 11(1) as now worded still refunds the tax on electricity consumed by the business, the consumer test on which both rulings turned.

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.