Stichting DataTruc Zeewolde

Stichting DataTruc Zeewolde — typically referred to as DataTruc Zeewolde — is a Dutch citizen-foundation established in early April 2021 by concerned residents of Zeewolde, Flevoland, to stop a proposed 166-hectare hyperscale data centre on the Trekkersveld IV industrial-zone extension. The data centre — eventually disclosed as a Meta / Facebook hyperscale facility — would have been the single largest such facility in the Netherlands and, by the foundation's framing, the largest of its kind in Europe. DataTruc Zeewolde is the corpus's first non-PauseAI Netherlands local-group anchor and the first European local-group entry organised specifically against a single hyperscale data-centre siting decision.

The foundation's campaign succeeded across two distinct seams: Meta itself permanently withdrew from the project on 1 July 2022, and the Dutch Council of State (Raad van State) annulled the underlying Trekkersveld IV zoning plan on 20 September 2023, closing the legal pathway for any successor hyperscale operator. The foundation is recorded here as historical: the immediate campaign goal was achieved, the litigation has run to a Council of State ruling, and the website now functions as a public record of the campaign rather than as an active organising vehicle.

Founding and structure

The foundation was constituted in early April 2021 by a small group of Zeewolde residents and presented its formal objections at the municipal offices on 6 April 2021, a few days after the municipal information session of 29 March 2021 at which the scale of the planned data centre first became public. The board is structured as a conventional Dutch stichting (foundation) with a three-person bestuur — Susan Schaap as voorzitter (chair), Wessel Ganzevoort as secretaris (secretary) and Dirk Teunissen as penningmeester (treasurer) — with Gerrit van der Heide listed as an adviseur (advisor). Schaap has been the foundation's principal public spokesperson and is widely identified in Dutch and international coverage as the leader of the local opposition.

The foundation's stated mission was to stop the realisation of the planned hyperscale data centre on Trekkersveld IV — characterised in the foundation's own framing as a "water- en stroomslurpende monster" (water- and electricity-guzzling monster) being imposed on a small village. Schaap's broader framing that "we all share responsibility for good stewardship of Mother Earth" located the campaign within a stewardship-of-land idiom rather than a single-issue protest register, and was central to the foundation's success in stitching together local farmers, environmental campaigners, wind-energy operators and ordinary residents.

Tactical repertoire

DataTruc Zeewolde combined four tactics over the 2021–2023 campaign, all directed at administrative-process and electoral leverage rather than confrontational direct action.

• Petition organising. The foundation launched a public petition shortly after constituting itself. The petition grew from roughly 750 signatures in April 2021 to 1,428 signatures by May 2021 and continued past 2,600 signatures by December 2021, eventually surpassing 5,000 — a substantial proportion of the village's adult population.
• Formal administrative objections (zienswijzen). The foundation filed formal zienswijzen (the Dutch administrative-law equivalent of public objections during planning consultation) on the draft bestemmingsplan, and subsequently joined as a named appellant in the appeal against the adopted bestemmingsplan before the Raad van State.
• Electoral mobilisation. Ahead of the March 2022 Dutch municipal elections, DataTruc Zeewolde publicly urged Zeewolde residents to vote for Leefbaar Zeewolde or the ChristenUnie — the two parties opposing the data-centre plan. Leefbaar Zeewolde won an absolute majority of seats on the new municipal council, recasting the local political conditions for the project within weeks of the election.
• Coalition appellate litigation. When the bestemmingsplan was nevertheless approved by the outgoing council and adopted, the foundation joined the appeal to the Afdeling bestuursrechtspraak (Administrative Jurisdiction Division) of the Raad van State alongside LTO Noord (the Dutch agricultural-sector union), Mobilisation for the Environment (MOB), Windpark Zeewolde (the existing wind-park operator), and several individual Zeewolde residents. The coalition shape — agriculture, environment, energy-sector operators and citizen-foundation — was a deliberate construction by DataTruc to give the appeal multi-sector standing.

Campaign outcome

The campaign succeeded across two distinct seams in the year between July 2022 and September 2023.

Meta's withdrawal (1 July 2022). Meta announced on 1 July 2022 that it would not proceed with the Zeewolde facility, stating that there was "not a good match" between the data centre and the location and that the construction was "not the right investment". The withdrawal followed a sequence of state-level actions enabled by the local political shift: the Dutch cabinet refused to approve the sale of the affected State-owned land to Meta, the Dutch Senate passed a motion asking the Rutte government to use its powers to block construction, and the cabinet enacted a nine-month national moratorium in February 2022 on permits for new data centres larger than 10 hectares. These state-level moves were directly downstream of the conditions DataTruc Zeewolde had created on the ground in Zeewolde.

Council of State ruling (20 September 2023). Even with Meta's withdrawal, the foundation continued the appeal against the bestemmingsplan to its conclusion. On 20 September 2023 the Afdeling bestuursrechtspraak annulled the Trekkersveld IV bestemmingsplan in full, finding that the municipal council should have entertained reasonable doubt about the plan's feasibility because the State, which owned much of the affected land, was not party to the agreements between the municipality, the province and Polder Networks. The ruling means no successor hyperscale operator can take Meta's place on the Trekkersveld IV footprint without the municipality starting the zoning process again from scratch.

Place in the movement

DataTruc Zeewolde is the corpus's first European local-group anchor on a single hyperscale data-centre siting decision and the first non-PauseAI Netherlands local-group entry. Its strategic register — small village stichting, formal administrative objections, electoral mobilisation, coalition-of-the-disparate at the appellate stage — sits distinctly within the small but growing constellation of grassroots local-group anchors organising against hyperscale AI compute siting in water- and energy-stressed geographies. Alongside the Chilean Cerrillos community-of-residents collective MOSACAT, the Mexican Querétaro women-led environmental-defender collective Voceras de la Madre Tierra and the Spanish coalition-convenor Tu Nube Seca Mi Río, DataTruc Zeewolde extends the constellation into northern-European temperate-climate, electricity-grid-stressed geographies where the political-economy frame is electricity rather than water — though water (cooling, light pollution, agricultural-land integrity) carries significant weight in the Dutch case too.

The foundation's distinctive contribution to the constellation is the integration of electoral mobilisation. Where Tu Nube Seca Mi Río organises civil-society coalitions for administrative objections, MOSACAT and Voceras lead community-level resistance with allied national groups, and the UK Foxglove / Global Action Plan challenge to UK hyperscale data centres operates through judicial review, DataTruc Zeewolde shifted the local political conditions under which the planning decision was made — using the March 2022 municipal election to install a council majority hostile to the project, then exploiting that shift to enable the cabinet refusal and Senate motion that triggered Meta's withdrawal. The combination of administrative-process litigation and electoral mobilisation at the village scale is the campaign's signature strategic contribution and the principal model the entry preserves for future European hyperscale-resistance organising.

Susan Schaap is a well-sourced candidate for a future Person entry: she is named repeatedly across Dutch-language outlets (Omroep Flevoland, Zeewolde Actueel, Ons Zeewolde, Computable.nl, Nieuwe Oogst) and international press (DutchNews.nl, DatacenterDynamics, CoStar, Silicon Republic, Euronews) as the foundation's principal public voice. The other named board members (Wessel Ganzevoort, Dirk Teunissen) are publicly known in the foundation's role but have substantially thinner standalone public output. The Dutch national civil-society organisations Bits of Freedom and Mobilisation for the Environment (MOB) — both relevant to a fuller Netherlands picture — sit adjacent to but outside the DataTruc Zeewolde organisational footprint; MOB is a future organisation-entry candidate for the strategic-litigation lane the Netherlands case opens.