The EU Commission is set to introduce the so-called "Data Carbon Tax" on July 1, 2026. This tax on 'dark data'—such as old emails or duplicate photos—is designed to offset the surging energy consumption of AI data centers powering ChatGPT, Gemini, and similar applications. In the future, users who fail to clean up their data within specified deadlines must expect financial penalties or even the mandatory deletion of their cloud storage.