I mean if you're gonna regulate, then regulate. But what's the point of making everyone do extra paperwork if there's no actual environmental effect of doing the paperwork because the big guys have loopholes

While the precedent is clearly bad individual DCs don't matter, as long as the actual consumption and environmental load correctly shows up in regional stats.

As long as they pay the quotas it doesn't matter. DCs don't eat the water, people can go and take samples, measure temperature. Heck, how complicated it will be to put out a solar panel powered thermometer with a SIM card? Or set up a drone with a IR camera to fly around a DC each day? If someone wants to carry out a crusade against DCs, sure, there's plenty of precedent for that too! (see Cervantes 1605 and 1615) And of course if hedge funds want to know when to short the AI bubble they'll be doing the same anyway, so the commission should ask them to publish their data with a few months lag.