Microsoft Middenmeer data center, Middenmeer, North Holland

Microsoft's data center campus on the Agriport A7 business park near Middenmeer, in the municipality of Hollands Kroon, North Holland, Netherlands, is operating, and Microsoft wants to grow it from ten data center buildings to sixteen. Microsoft presented its expansion plan to the Hollands Kroon council in September 2025, after buying 50 hectares across the road for six more buildings, and expects to file its final application, covering an environmental permit and impact assessment, in the second half of 2026.

The existing halls used 1.17 terawatt hours of electricity in 2025, more than one percent of all power used in the Netherlands, the national enterprise agency RVO reported in July 2026. From the start of construction until mid-2025, Microsoft invested nearly 12.5 billion euros at the site, about 5 billion in land and buildings and 7.5 billion in servers and other equipment, its Dutch data center unit's latest annual accounts show. Those accounts showed 458 full-time employees at Microsoft's data center arm in 2025, a year in which it paid 27 million euros in corporate tax.

Water use has caused trouble before: in 2021 the regional paper Noordhollands Dagblad found the campus had used 84 million liters of drinking water, 75 million of it for cooling, after Microsoft and the municipality had told residents it would need only 12 to 20 million liters a year. Microsoft said the figure covered the water-heavy construction phase, and that cooling switches from outside air to water only above 25 degrees Celsius, which happened on six days in 2021.

Microsoft also built ahead of its permits once before: NRC reported in November 2020 that it had started a second large data center without the required environmental permit, and farmers' group LTO argued the province, not the municipality, should decide because of the site's heavy emergency generators. Hollands Kroon granted the building's permit, for a hall called Het Venster, in January 2021, after setting aside nearly all of 64 objections over horizon pollution, a lack of public participation and high energy use. A November 2022 Council of State ruling still forced Microsoft to seek after-the-fact approval for nitrogen released during that construction, which NRC reported was still unresolved in February 2023, more than a year after building began.

Robert Leever, a Hollands Kroon alderman, said Microsoft's earlier plan had come as "a great shock" to residents, and Nick Hengelman, who runs Microsoft's Dutch data centers, said the company had "learned from last time" and wanted to be transparent about its plans early on. In June 2026 Microsoft paid 44 million euros for 37.5 hectares of farmland in Middenmeer next to a site where grid operator TenneT is considering a new high-voltage substation, and has already applied for a grid connection there, NRC reported from land registry records.

Hollands Kroon's coalition agreement says no new data centers will be allowed outside the existing Agriport A7 area, and only on two sites already zoned for it. A municipal spokesperson said the new farmland parcel is zoned for agriculture and greenhouses with no rezoning application under way, and that the municipality had earlier stopped a data center CyrusOne wanted to build on the same parcel, citing too many big developments for public participation to keep up. Microsoft says it has no data center plans for the new parcel yet, though it would like to build there one day; its final application for the six-building expansion is expected in the second half of 2026.