Ireland wanted to build data centres for the AI boom – Now they fear blackouts
Dozens of data centres humming at the outskirts of Dublin are consuming more electricity than all of the urban homes in Ireland.
And now they are starting to wear out the warm welcome that brought them here.
Ireland is a country that made itself a computing factory for Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and TikTok. It is wondering whether it was all worth it as tech giants look around the world to build even more data centres to fuel the next wave of artificial intelligence.
Fears of rolling blackouts led Ireland’s grid operator to halt new data centres near Dublin until 2028. These huge buildings and their powerful computers last year consumed 21% of the nation’s electricity, according to official records. No other country has reported a higher burden to the International Energy Agency.
Not only that, but Ireland is still heavily reliant on burning fossil fuels to generate electricity, despite a growing number of wind farms sprouting across the countryside. Further data centre expansion threatens Ireland’s goals to sharply cut planet-warming emissions.
Energy researcher Paul Deane of University College Cork, said:
Ireland is a microcosm of what many countries could be facing over the next decade, particularly with the growth of AI,
Twenty-six-year-old activist Darragh Adelaide lives in a working-class Dublin suburb just across a busy motorway from Grange Castle Business Park, one of Ireland’s biggest data centre clusters. It could get even bigger were Adelaide not a thorn in the side of Google’s expansion plans.
Adelaide said,
It’s kind of an outrageous number of data centres,
“People have started to make the connection between the amount of electricity they’re using and electricity prices going up.”
Ireland has attracted global tech companies since the “Celtic Tiger” boom at the turn of the 21st century. Tax incentives, a highly skilled, English-speaking workforce and the country’s membership in the European Union have all contributed to making the tech sector a central part of the Irish economy. The island is also a node for undersea cables that extend to the U.S., Britain, Iceland and mainland Europe.
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Ireland wanted to build data centres for the AI boom – Now they fear blackouts, source
