Irish datacenters now guzzle 23% of the country's electricity
theregister.com
theregister.com
It's misplaced to be angry about datacenters themselves. There IS value being created, or people wouldn't use the tools.
Construction creates jobs, manufacturing the machines in the buildings is a huge global industry; the value people gain in their work and play is considered worthwhile by them individually.
In the aggregate it all happens in a boring building shaped like a box, mostly built out of the way for economic reasons, and which if well engineered can be pretty efficient for what it does for the human race.
While I do think there is value being created, I think this form of argument is not as watertight as it appears at first glance. Humans are very capable of behaving irrationally.
I think there is a lot of harmful, negative “work” being done by AI today. Creating fake videos for Facebook, running girlfriend bots, automated scams, etc. Even employees just trying to be at the top of their employers’ AI token leaderboards. (So last month, I know). There is legitimate value being created, but I don’t think it’s obvious that the positive value is swamping the negative value 10:1.
“There is value being created, or people wouldn’t buy the meth” - people do buy meth, quite enthusiastically, but any sane person would think allocating 23% of a nation’s electricity to a meth factory is a bad plan.
It's actually a sliding scale of badness, but for the sake of argument let's pop a marker on that imaginary badness line and call everything worse than our marker "bad" and everything better than it "good". Let's also assume such objective criteria exist. This is a lot of assumptions!
Now, assuming we got this far, is the "bad" 1% of the sum? Or 90%? 99%? Because we just don't know, I'm going to make another assumption and assume it's a tiny minority.
We still sell knives even though they can stab. Mostly though, knives do other knife things. And we have police and courts to deal with the bad uses.
The good information is again being siloed to hide it from the scrapers, destroying a massive amount of value.
Poisoning the well of human trust is one of the worst things you can do to society.
Most people I know use it as a tool to do things for them, technical or otherwise.
Even the loneliest people I know don't want to talk to a clanker unless there's at least a pretense of work being done.
How would you react if you got a panicked call from your spouse and it came from their phone number?
To answer your question, it's a series of different but huge problems.
https://www.iansresearch.com/resources/all-blogs/post/securi...
https://www.rfi.fr/en/international-news/20260603-20-minutes...
https://cbsaustin.com/news/local/deepfake-scams-are-creeping...
There's also a whole industry of basically "virtual onlyfans" models that generate a TON of content and ad impressions on everything from Instagram, X, TikTok, even Twitch.tv
I would be surprised if an AI successfully imitated the batshit insane way my wife and I speak to one another, but I get how that could work for, say, a grandparent or aunty.
>There's also a whole industry of basically "virtual onlyfans" models that generate a TON of content and ad impressions on everything from Instagram, X, TikTok, even Twitch.tv
Are there stats on this? Like if you look at the top hundred influencers on these platforms, how many of them are AI? Is it a long tail?
Like you do hear a lot of stories about this kind of thing happening, but I haven't ever seen a figure that says something like "$x million lost to AI scams" the way you do with romance scams or crypto.
https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-models-creators-see-succe...
https://www.euronews.com/culture/2026/03/17/meet-jessica-fos...
> Like you do hear a lot of stories about this kind of thing happening, but I haven't ever seen a figure that says something like "$x million lost to AI scams" the way you do with romance scams or crypto.
Most people don't have a couple mil laying around. If you mean collectively, how many dudes are going to call the FBI or whatever and admit their life savings are fucked because they fell for AI goon bait? I expect not many.
> would be surprised if an AI successfully imitated the batshit insane way my wife and I speak to one another, but I get how that could work for, say, a grandparent or aunty.
What if her emails and texts between you had been scraped? Very easy and to grab that and record voice with single click or no-click tap jacking attacks.
I really cant be stuffed defending AI. It either succeeds or it doesnt. But we get so much value from Data Centers and there's basically no one lauding them as an industry. Its like people waking up one morning and hating trains.
Its like people just discovered they existed yesterday and hate them for no reason.
That doesn't mean we would benefit from expanding those industries by triple-digit percents just to increase the profits of multibillion-dollar corporations without some pretty strong justifications.
In this case, "data centers" don't benefit anyone in and of themselves. They are merely a container for, well, data. And compute. So the degree to which they benefit us depends entirely on what data is stored there or what is being computed there.
Thus, trying to separate "AI hate" from data centers is not merely unhelpful, it's effectively meaningless. The datacenters are the AI that happens within them. That's literally the only reason so many more are being built now.
Ok but people are crowing against existing data centers.
>In this case, "data centers" don't benefit anyone in and of themselves
Yeah they do.
>They are merely a container for, well, data. And compute.
No they are also neutral hosts of telecommunications infrastructure where carriers can meet.
This is like saying that you like emergency services calls but want to blow up the wires that carry them.
>The datacenters are the AI that happens within them.
Patently ridiculous.
>That's literally the only reason so many more are being built now.
No you really just started paying attention.
Also "So Many" whats the correct number of Datacenters to be built? How are you calculating that? What happens if AI instead cannibalises existing rack space instead of expanding? What happens to industries that rely on colo when these trillion dollar companies make better offers for their rackspace? Do they just go nowhere? This is like attacking houses because you don't like a subset of tenants.
Maybe they should have been smarter but you operate with more information, you can pay brokers to convince the villagers to sell all their pigs and now the villagers starve, they will find someone who promises to make things right and they will burn your SPAM factory.
People should just keep driving inefficient cars rather than having gas prices increase so they can evaluate whether getting a more efficient car makes sense for them.
You're assuming many can even buy a car right now, let alone a new one.
I would assume in the first world people can have cars and air conditioning, maybe not having AC, a car, or a home is a first world problem now. If an average person in a middle income country can drive a car, surely its possible for most of humanity.
Commensurate with their costs, including externalities? That very much remains to be seen.
But for who and where is it realized? Ireland’s massive data centers aren’t there to serve Ireland’s tiny population. The value is exported overseas and profits realized overseas.
So what really matters for Ireland (and any country/region hosting these data centers) is whether the benefits in terms of capital spending + the few ongoing jobs created outweighs any increased electricity and environmental costs faced by everyone else.
Perhaps construction companies could hire some copyright lobbyists to get a law passed so they're paid 75 years after the creation of the work.
Exactly, which is WHY IDA Ireland and Enterprise Ireland have been a data center first policy in Ireland since the mid-2000s.
Heck, the only reason Microsoft and Google ended up in Dublin was because the IDA clubbed employment creation with data center construction in the 2000s.
Ireland in the 1990s and 2000s was roughly comparable to Greece developmentally back then and also suffered a Greek style economic meltdown from 2008-13. The only reason Ireland didn't stagnate like Greece was because of how business and tech FDI friendly Ireland was.
Like, Ireland supplied basically all of the English docs for windows 95, and Apple have been in cork since the 80s.
More generally, the reason tech companies came to Ireland since the 2000s was for tax purposes, which ironically enough lead to us getting bucket loads of corporate tax after the OECD reforms.
And no, Ireland in the 2000s was not developmentally the same as Greece, you may be thinking of the 80s and 90s.
But yeah, the only reason we don't look as indebted as Greece is due to our ludicrous GDP figures.
Yep, but the bulk of R&D FDI and the expansion of Ireland's tech scene only arose after Google opened it's campus in Dublin, which itself was in large part to help coordinate Google's data center expansion - especially after acquiring Colt.
> More generally, the reason tech companies came to Ireland since the 2000s was for tax purposes
Not really from personal experience - the tax incentives were nice, but Netherlands also provided a similar tax regime to Ireland during that time period.
It was the data center buildout and incentives by IDA and Enterprise Ireland that were the foundation of Ireland becoming the "Silicon Republic".
Google wouldn't have expanded without the Colt acquisition. Microsoft wouldn't have expanded it's footprint in Ireland without the Data Electronics partnership. Amazon, Vodafone, EMC, Yahoo, and other early 2000s tech companies that helped seed much of the tech industry in Ireland today.
> And no, Ireland in the 2000s was not developmentally the same as Greece
At least with regards to HDI and other developmental indicators, Ireland and Greece both overlapped well into the 2000s. The divergence between the two only kicked in after 2008.
> Apple have been in cork since the 80s...
And was limited to assembly before shifting that to China in the 2000s.
Apple would have entirely left Ireland around then as well if IDA and Enterprise Ireland didn't incentivize Apple to hire support and supply chain staff in Cork - heck, Apple employs around 3% of Cork as a result now.
> But yeah, the only reason we don't look as indebted as Greece is due to our ludicrous GDP figures
It's not just about being indebted. Ireland's median household incomes now significantly exceed those of the UK despite similar CoL - which wasn't a guarantee in the 2000s.
------
Ireland becoming what it is today was not a given in the 2000s - the IDA and Enterprise Ireland pushed boulders to seed the data center ecosystem which helped build the DevOps and Infra ecosystem which then helped seed the domestic ecosystem that exists today.
All the major foreign players in Ireland's tech scene had the option to open in the UK, Netherlands, and Germany as well, but it was the IDA's hard work and foresight in recognizing that data centers and DevOps would allow Ireland to leverage the cloud hyperscaler boom and climb the value chain which allowed Ireland to reach the point it is at today.
Kneecapping an industry that is the bedrock of Ireland's economy will not help Ireland's existing issues - it will only make them worse by incentivizing the industry to shift to competitors like Czechia, Poland, and Romania (all three of whom have adopted Ireland's playbook). Even the UK has begun to use Ireland's playbook to retain it's tech scene.
If you build where power is expensive - you are burning world even more.
If you don’t want your landscape vandalised with windmills and powerlines, go nuclear. Especially where the weather is consistently miserable, not conducive to solar power.
Data centers pay sub-market rates for electricity (as well as getting tax relief, generally). Generally, they use so much electricity that more infrastructure needs to be built. Who pays for that? Not the data center. The utility's capex is spread across all customers (sometimes minus the data center).
Then the utility needs to generate moer power or buy it from elsewhere. That's typically at a higher rate than it's currently getting, which raises the average cost of electricity for everyone. But again, the data center is getting a discounted rate so you have a water bed effect raising everyone's prices there too.
And for what? Maybe a few dozens jobs. The "value" being created is for multinational corporations who likely won't pay anything in taxes for it.
Data centers should be taxed for the land value they allegedly create. We have precedents for this sort of thing, most notably imputed rent. So if you spend $300 million on a building that lasts 30 years, that's worth $10M/year+. Then there's all the compute hardware. Assume $700M amortized over 7 years. Well, the imputed rent is at least $110M/year in base costs, so likely $150M+/year.
All this adds up to it should have to pay tens of millions (and maybe as much as $100M/year) in taxes.
uh... how? they do pay for what they use.
Don't you ever stop to wonder why?
Some of the assumption seems valid such as additional infrastructure cost. But I wonder if that is much of anything. I would assume the DC actually paying for the connection. If that is the case additional capex is not spread across consumer.
The other question is that DC provides a decent baseline for electricity usage. Generally speaking that is a good thing. So it is not an additional burden as implied here.
Third being DC is still paying for the electricity. It is not getting subsidised pricing. They may be getting discount wholesale price due to its volume. But it is not like they are selling at a loss while the rest are covered by consumers.
Generally speaking I don't understand why everyone is suddenly against DC. It may be an issue if power generation hasn't been able to keep up. But in most cases so far that is not what is happening here.
Contrarian to the article or to other HN commenters
This article reports on facts, i.e., the CSO data primarily. It also mentions the existence of controversy
It is not taking a position for or against anything
What does it mean to be "contrarian" with respect to an article like this one
To me, this weird defensive behaviour, i.e., absurd attempts to "argue in favour of data centers", is what raises a red flag
The reporting of facts on energy and water use, i.e., data, triggers this behaviour from HN commenters, as opposed to being triggered by the people who are protesting or campaigning against data centers. This article and many others like it have no hint of "anger" whatsoever. The authors are not taking sides in any debate
Then we have companies actively trying to conceal data about data centers. This sort of behaviour is, IMHO, a red flag
If data centers "have value" and are needed despite their impacts, and the proof of this is that "people are using AI" then what's the problem
Why respond to articles that simply report usage statistics (cf. responding to angry protesters or legislation aimed at regulating data center construction)
The article is not taking a position for or against the construction and operation of data centers
"Data centres accounted for almost a quarter of the electricity consumed in Ireland last year, up from 5 per cent in 2015, the Central Statistics Office (CSO) said on Tuesday, amid continuing public debate around the strain the sector is putting on Irish energy infrastructure."
A total of 7,663 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of electricity from Ireland's expanding grid capacity was used by data centres in 2025, up 10 per cent from 6,973GWh in 2024.
Consumption by all other users, including households, rose by just 2 per cent over the same period, the statistics agency said.
In total, data centres alone accounted for 23 per cent of metered electricity consumption last year, up from just over a fifth in 2024.
The latest CSO figures also reveal that data centres increased their electricity consumption on a quarterly basis, from 291 GWh in the first quarter of 2015 to 1,991 GWh in the fourth quarter of last year."
These are just facts. The aricle is not arguing for or against anything
But HN commenters get triggered by such reporting
That's a red flag, IMHO
The grid is only looking after its capacity. When Grange Castle announced they're adding nearly 200MW of generation (for a nearly 1GW site) planners whoop with joy but that's 200GW of gas turbine for when they've spiked the wholesale price of electricity. It's not grid-surplus storage.
That sort of economic activity drives inflation. Well before you consider maybe-effects like job reduction.
They all have the same issues:
1) Pricing that doesn't account for externalities.
2) Those who bear the consequences are not those who reap the benefits
Because I guarantee you the people who pointed out that plastic surgery was covered have ideas of what that should be.
Plastic surgery can include burn and emergency surgical scars (trauma surgeons are just trying to keep your insides in and your outsides out, and then they have to run to the next patient to do the same), and hair transplants can include head injuries or cancer surgeries in young people in addition to vain old men.
When we discuss things like this in political arenas, nuance goes out the window and you're contributing to condemning little girls to walk around with giant patches of missing hair and people to tolerate visible scars that will absolutely be used to illegally discriminate against them for jobs that would allow them to afford their own procedures.
I'm all for pricing externalities in. There are some obvious ways to do that with plastic surgeons on scholarships. There are ways to do that with natural resources and power generation and distribution. There's also perhaps space for making deals with the government where load shedding occurs in the data centers, not unlike how the power companies deal with foundries and such.
(what was this about getting muted?)
I said "But once we stop doing things entirely because we are jealous of how some people use it"
That's not jealousy, that's totalitarianism. I'm not going to let you do it at all because I don't like it. The "reason" is jealousy, the action is control.
The electric grid and education are both a sort of commons. Once you start telling people how or if they're allowed to use it, you better have a good goddamned reason for doing so. You can block a data center - and we probably should block some of these data centers - the way people have blocked Walmarts: by demonstrating that the store is entirely extractive and is a drain on local infrastructure and impoverishes communities, and either make them make the community whole or fuck off to be someone else's problem.
If you start moralizing how people can use electricity to block something like this, you're going to quickly rediscover that some people think vibrators are morally wrong, and they'll try to block those too.
I started all of this talking about politics. How you do something matters as much as if or why, once you include everyone instead of just deciding you know best for everyone else.
Either entitlement to the doctors/engineers labor or a house one doesnt own.
I dont think externalities is the most useful model for thinking about this because it is easy to construct a more favorable hypothetical. That doesnt mean one is entiteled to it.
It might be evidence that you or your government isn't benefiting you with its spending. That doesnt put obligation on the recipient.
This is substantially different than expecting control on how debt free doctors or engineers spend their time or what jobs they work.
The crux of this is that externalty price analysis is only useful when bounded by real harms and property rights. Otherwise, anyone can call anything they dont like an externality: If my employee quits for a better job- Externality! If a woman wants to go home to their family instead of having sex with me - Externality!
Seems fine if the government or another group was willing to lend or pay for education in exchange for future services.
I think it would be bad policy if the government made this the only way or a licensing requirement.
There are also some moral hazards if the exit Clauses aren't reasonable.
I was recently reading about the poet Joseph Brodsky's trial for sicial parisitism in the Krushchev era.
They committed the crime of unauthorized use of personal time to right poetry.
Certainly common resources are very vulnerable to incorrect pricing and profiteering.
In the past there are many cases where local populations were deprived from their vital needs because some king/queen/sultan/khan etc needed that more.
In the US a teaching degree might be $50,000, and medical degree might be $500,000. I'm not sure I want my state government covering half a million in education costs for one person... I know that we need doctors but I'd want to see some ROI numbers to justify such a high expense.
Water and power are priced by third parties, if they aren't passing some cost on to datacenters thats not the fault of datacenters.
>Those who bear the consequences are not those who reap the benefits
Super broad statement that cannot be meaningfully tested. Your power goes up, but your ISP has more and better peers, your emergency services have redundant vxc's between redundant sites, your steam games are cached more locally, your data is hosted in country rather than overseas and hundreds of other little benefits. A lot of which would cause greater whinging if they suddenly evaporated.
If there was suddenly a bunch of people angry at plumbing because pipes had become expensive, and I found myself having to defend the dual benefits of fresh water and sewerage removal, I would likewise try and identify the root cause of pipes being expensive before crazed internet commentators tried to rip up important infrastructure.
Or about 11,000 GWh which is about 4% of California which means without the theatrics:
California has 4x more data centers than Ireland.
California: ~810 watts per person. (278,000 GWh / 39.4 million people)
Ireland: ~690 watts per person. (32,000 GWh / 5.3 million people)
We have air conditioning and that may be why we use more POWAH
edit: I live in Ireland
Ireland has a lot of oil in their power mix from what I'm seeing, so that makes a bit of sense.
Maybe the high power cost is why they're deploying ~600GWh of new wind capacity per year for the last 15 years. Because at those rates the wholesale prices should be able to subsidize a lot of loans.
I cannot even express how much hatred I have for bad charts, and getting tricked by one anyway when I go in already expecting it to be lying to me is incandescently indescribable.
On Wikipedia there's a very progressive-looking chart that is measuring in TWh/year and going up up up. And as you say,
>Ireland lacks any energy storage so none of that wind can be used for baseload
You always measure baseload in GW or if you're fancy, TW.
So what that chart is really saying is that Wind is adding on average about 70 KW of capacity per year, when amortized over 24 hours. Which is probably on the order of an additional .3GW of capacity per year when the sun is shining and bupkis the rest of the time.
Although given how overcast that region is, maybe measuring solar in TWh/year is a bit excusable, and then they end up measuring everything else that way?
https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/industries-and-topics/electrical-ene...
There was a push a year or two back to make it fully income based, where you would have to give the power company your w2 to determine your rate, but it was rejected (for now)
[1]: This alone will increase costs by something like 4c/kWh from these 70 year old dams: https://www.king5.com/article/news/investigations/skagit-riv...
https://www.seattle.gov/city-light/residential-services/bill...
And the time periods are: https://www.seattle.gov/images/Departments/CityLight/Residen...
So you're paying a marginally higher rate almost all day on variable-rate, but substantially higher 5-9pm. The math pencils if you have a home battery you can use to load-shift, or perhaps drive an EV a lot.
(Also: this structure is clearly designed around summer cooling load, but peak load is actually winter heating. I don't know what SCL is thinking.)
My power is USD$0.271/kWh and I'm nowhere near Ireland.
Not neccesarily saying it makes economic sense to get a loan to install solar, just that homeowners usually aren't the poor class that saying usually applies to.
The housing market is such that a lot of people are overextended, and the mortgage market encourages people to change their definition of 'enough' house which makes it worse again.
The fact that I don't have solar on my roof is substantially my own fault. I moved in a year after a subsidy ended and it contributed to my procrastination. But then my power grid is comparatively cheap and comparatively renewable, which also contributes.
But I know a lot of people who know a lot of people who can't even stay on top of keeping their expected house repairs up. And that's also an investment in energy and your time and having construction people in your personal space for 2x as long as they estimated it would take.
If they're so productive, make them eat the cost and lead time so we can all have a cheap, functional electricity grid. It would be so easy to mandate no new data centres unless they can procure their own renewable sources of electricity.
https://www.electricireland.ie/residential/news/detail/elect...
Heck, Google itself only expanded in Ireland back in the 2000s in large part because they worked on acquiring Colt to build their European CoLo in Ireland, and data centers now represent around 18% of Ireland's total GVA [2].
[0] - https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/hyperscalers/microsoft-p...
[1] - https://www.siliconrepublic.com/science/ireland-has-the-pote...
[2] - https://www.iiea.com/blog/data-centres-in-ireland-the-state-...
Why should Ireland undermine 13% of it's GDP [0]?
Edit: can't reply
> Telling American multinationals you will have them pay 0 tax isn't exactly a "tax policy" as such
Ireland's corporate tax rate is 12.5% but drops to 6.25% if it's qualified R&D and IP income with an added 35% R&D tax credit.
It's attractive, but CEE states like Poland and Czechia can (and often do) match that.
The biggest attraction for Ireland is the fact that everyone speaks English in Ireland, and Irish tax and corporate legal firms have worked with American firms since the 1990s, which reduces the headache.
> Or to 0.005% if you're Apple
Which ended in 2014, yet Ireland still remains attractive for tech FDI.
At the end of the day, Ireland executed much better than it's developmental peers in the 1990s (Spain, Czechia, Russia, Ukraine, Cyprus, Greece, Argentine, and Libya in 1991 based on HDI) simply because it was much more business friendly.
[0] - https://www.trade.gov/country-commercial-guides/ireland-digi...
Or to 0.005% if you're Apple.
>The Commission's investigation concluded that Ireland granted illegal tax benefits to Apple, which enabled it to pay substantially less tax than other businesses over many years. In fact, this selective treatment allowed Apple to pay an effective corporate tax rate of 1 per cent on its European profits in 2003 down to 0.005 per cent in 2014.
Undercutting other countries on tax policy tends to piss them off. So it comes down to whether the benefits of the policy outweigh the blowback.
The 13% of GDP figure can be a bit misleading as GDP from being a tax haven tends to help the average irish citizen a lot less than more traditional ecconomic activity.
As I pointed out, if Ireland didn't adopt it's tech FDI policy which it did in the 1990s, it would be a much poorer country today.
Going from Libyan, Soviet, and Greek to Finland level living standards in 30 years was not guaranteed, and it was Ireland's business friendly policies is what ensured it became a tech hub today and didn't fall into the middle income trap - especially in 2008-12 when Ireland was also in the midst of a Greece style economic meltdown (remember the PIGS?)
Ireland was a developing country in the 1990s, and if they executed better than then much richer Western European states like Germany, France, the UK, and Canada then so be it.
> GDP from being a tax haven tends to help the average irish citizen a lot less than more traditional ecconomic activity.
I've been using HDI which isn't severely impacted by GDP per capita.
And even then, Ireland's median household income [0] is now significantly higher than the UK [1] despite living standard in the UK having been significantly higher than Ireland's until the 2010s because of Ireland's FDI policy.
> Undercutting other countries on tax policy tends to piss them off
Other EU member states such as Poland and Czechia also match Ireland's incentives when asked, which has helped both Czechia and Poland now catch up to historically richer France, Italy, and the UK.
[0] - https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-silc/surv...
[1] - https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personal...
Perhaps, but if you want to measure the effect it had on ordinary Irish people you should be using GNI not GDP. I'm not saying it had no effect, just that GDP is a misleading measure.
And even with GNI my argument still holds. I'm surprised how so many HNers don't remember how poor Ireland used to be until 20-30 years ago, especially given how most HNers are in their 30s to 40s.
Ireland, South Korea, and Israel are the poster children of developing countries that successfully escaping the middle income trap and climbing up the economic value chain back in the 2010s.
Or they could use coercive measures to punish the countries undercutting them. There is no world police after all to prevent them.
A big reason why capitalism works is 2 factors: its easy to start competitors and established players are not allowed to shoot up and coming companies. Neither apply to countries.
I'm not arguing about whether its a good thing or not, just that it is the way the world works. Whether or not Ireland's policies are a good idea depends on how much value they capture vs how much value they lose due to their consequences, chief among them being the strain such policies can put on foreign relations & trade.
No we fucking don't. I have no idea how you reached that position in the uber era.
I don't have a list of material evidence, so i don't expect to convince anyone else. Appreciate the reply.
We're still investing in Ireland because IDA and Enterprise Ireland are competent.
And at the end of the day, Luxembourg, Malta, Cyprus, Latvia, Slovenia, Estonia, Austria, Czechia, Hungary, Germany, Poland, Netherlands, and Croatia have all voted with or abstained in favor of Ireland when questions about Ireland's approach came up in the EU.
The primary countries complaining have been France, Italy, and Spain.
However that does not make this construct any more moral
The country could easily solve its electricity problems with nuclear power. They can ask South Korea for help who built four reactors in UAE with 12 years which now provide 25% of the country’s electricity.
One of the problems with nuclear is that, for practical and security reasons, you are dependent on an authoritarian regime to run the plant -- a plant that will be inherently not-transparent for the same reasons.
That means you have to trust the authorities in question to tell you the truth about risks like accidental discharges of radioactive waste. In the case of Ireland, which has a long history of being disenfranchised, the trust is understandably broken.
This makes building a new nuclear plant and having it run in your country by the same powers that screwed you over before with the same technology a non-starter.
It seems you didn't read the Sellafield article. If you want to be intellectually honest, I'd suggest starting there. (or at least with the "Incidents" section)
If your uncle hitting his thumb meant everyone in his line and all of his neighbors would have a flat thumb for the next million years then the government would absolutely involve itself in hammer design and operational safety guidelines.
Yes, waste lasts a long time. That's mostly in the form of a pond of slightly clicky water. The fear is overblown. See http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2026/ph241/teixeira2/
However. People all over the world live on top of aquifers that have been naturally radioactive for millions of years. See you at the protest against granite bedrock.
Thanks to commenters. (teachrdan and hinkley)
Yes, I know the reasoning. I am one of those who is against nuclear power stations, Chernobyl and Fukushima are too vivid.
But. If we don't "re-industrialise" the West, we die in a cold and darkness. Literally. We already killed marine ecosystem in Black and Caspian seas. Moving as planned in Gulf. With amount of oil tankers just burning out in the open the "carbon emission" goals seem like a joke. And still – we keep crippling our industry with all this ... I am tempted to say "nonsense", but it's not. It's actually right thing to do but we "outmaneuvered" ourselves out of right things. Now we have to deal with survival – economy first, people later.
If you refer to the burning Russian tankers in the Azov, that should reduce emissions. The carried oil would've been used internally in Russia, so it's better to just burn it before it gets used, the same emissions would've been there anyway. And burning the tankers and refineries restricts Russian oil production, which is is a win both for the environment and mankind alike.
Then there are proposals to charge homeowners based on insalled capacity. Part of NEM 3.0 in California was a $8/month per KW, but it was defeated. Who is to say it wont be back in 4.0? that would be about a $1000/yr fee for a 10 kw home system.
I'm not aware of any part of California where a permit and panel upgrade would cost more than $7000.
But if you're in those parts of California, your price is also 55c/kWh, not 35c. So... you're still better off.
The data scientists aren’t the ones working in the data centres. There’s no real advantage to having the data they’re working on next door unless it’s extremely lag sensitive.
Local proximity of a datacentre is good for fintech, Netflix and gaming servers.
So has Ireland made an agreement with them in some way?
I’m just imagining that if there’s no local value for three beyond some temp construction jobs and a handful of service jobs, surely they can just bilk them until they leave. So I imagine data center companies only locate where they can get very safe terms?
When it comes to renewal, the DC operator obviously has a sunk cost that they don't want to walk away from. But the electricity generators are also in the same boat. If the DC shuts up shop then there's x00 MW that the generator won't be able to sell and could suppress prices across the whole country. So both parties are incentivised to come to an agreement.
(Ireland has challenges getting enough renewable energy to the island, as well as connecting the northern and southern parts with transmission due to local citizens not friendly to the need for transmission infra; data centers do not belong in Ireland, build them in countries in Europe that have excess clean energy, Spain and France specifically, and eat any latency as unavoidable)
Data Centers have been the cornerstone of Ireland's economy since the mid-2000s when the IDA began wooing tech FDI specifically by calling out data center expansion opportunities within the EU [0].
Also, if Europeans actually wish to have a sovereign tech industry, they need domestic compute capacity.
Complaining about American tech dependency and then immediately complaining about steps to build EU tech sovereignty is literally a contradiction.
[0] - https://www.siliconrepublic.com/science/ireland-has-the-pote...
I believe so. They're not known for neutrally reporting them, which is different.
I don't have any problem with The Register, but reporting laden with value-judging adjectives is not objective.
If people seriously think claims like this are “objective”, I weep for our collective understanding of reality.
Of course it’s excessive. Ireland’s electricity is not cheap or in such plentiful supply that homes are not affective by this. These data centres are driving up the electricity prices for everyone in Ireland.
Of course it’s excessive. There are only 80 datacentres that used 7.8TWh between them in 2025. That amount of power is used by only the heaviest of industries; it’s 3x more power than the UK steel industry uses, for example.
Of course it’s excessive. The amount of energy used means that more fossil fuels is being used to power them than would otherwise be necessary. Legislation has been written so that new datacentres must in future provide their own [fossil fuel] generators. This in a time of man-made climate change where we all urgently need to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. It’s not just excessive, it’s deeply irresponsible.
It shouldn't surprise you to know that there are people who disagree with everything you're saying. Do you really believe they're all "objectively wrong"? That's the territory of religion - "only my beliefs are the real ones".
“Excessive: exceeding what is usual, proper, necessary, or normal”
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/excessive
The power use of data centres is objectively exceeding what is usual or normal. Therefore it is objectively excessive.
For data centers, none of those adjectives are being exceeded, so it's not excessive. Ireland is not using more power to run its data centers than anywhere else is, for data centers of a similar size.
To justify the claim of "excessive", you need to define some standard against which that's being measured. That choice of standard is necessarily subjective.
Again, this attempt to reframe subjective claims as objective is an act of either ignorance (not understanding what "objective" means) or zealotry (believing your opinions are the only ones that can be correct, and therefore "objective".) Either way, you need to examine what you're claiming more closely.
You’ve decided that those don’t matter and you’ve created some other metrics by which you could consider the power use typical.
But just because you’ve found a way to say that they’re typical in one way, that doesn’t mean they’re not excessive in another way. They do use power to excess in some ways, therefore it’s perfectly legitimate to describe them as excessive in that way.
Data centres’ power use is becoming a problem for multiple reasons. The problem isn’t going to be solved by denying that a problem exists, or by taking offense when an adjective is used that draws attention to said problem.
> zealotry (believing your opinions are the only ones that can be correct)
Indeed.
The Reg keeps a snarky tone, but immediately becomes deferential once a vendor begins a content campaign with them.
They also operated a bot account on HN for years that was spamming Register articles for almost 3 years and accumulated 66K karma until I and a couple others complained about it.
It's called an editorial.
It's not supposed to be a mere report, concerned with respecting any random person's feeling about how all electricity consumption is equally valid and should be equally respected.
The article cited the latest figures from Ireland's Central Statistics Office (CSO).
There's little need here for Niels Bohr or a bleeding edge virologist to lean in on annual summary stats on civil infrastructure usage.
They certainly have BSc Mathematics types. What is the additional scientific discipline you think needs to weigh in here?
This article reports that Irish data centres use a particular percentage of the countries power.
> What they need is expertise in energy generation.
Okay, so an actual Electrical Engineer with grid scale experience.
> They need to understand concepts like a duck curve, power storage and its material requirements, relative EROEI of various power generation sources and a basic understanding of when newer forms of generation are likely to be ready.
Many people with a STEM background understand these things .. they are not generally called "scientists" in Commonwealth English.
Sure, but none of them work at the institution referenced by the article. That isn't what they do.
The difference is that much of the communication on that end happens in backchannels, directly with the regulators, in secret meetings, without any possibility of public scrutiny.
(When that isn't enough, the firehose of paid advertisements gets fired up to convince the public, instead.)
They all have a closed cooling loop, but almost all of them cool the exterior condensers with an open cooling loop.
Which draws from the watermain, sprays water on the hot condensers, the water evaporates, cooling the condensers. This is done to reduce their electric bills, because condensers operate more efficiently when they are cold.
The fully closed-loop data center, with air-cooled condensers is the exception, not the rule. Because it sucks even more electricity than a regular one, due to its less-efficient cooling.
You are spreading falsehoods, while also accusing people who are factually accurate of being foreign propaganda mouthpieces. This is at best, ironic and jingoistic, and at worst...
Also, you are arguing jargon...and data centers use completely closed loop designs where it makes sense (very cheap power) and use what you describe where it makes sense (with more expensive power and cheaper water). Finally, nothing you said disproves that there is a significant propaganda effort to demonize datacenters by a foreign power.
The dirty water bit is the most ridiculous thing. It's meant to paint the picture that the data centers themselves are using the water and dirtying it, when in reality the cause is the development of the actual buildings and infrastructure, which would happen with any industrial development!
All the arguments I see against data centers are arguments against industrialization. There are also arguments against capitalism and wealth inequality, that I sympathise with.
How do you figure? Surely it becomes propaganda for the opinion?
Journalists are not supposed to let opinions show in their reporting, that’s why editorials exist.
—Hunter Thompson, letter to William Kennedy, 1959
“An institution that should always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty.”
—Joseph Pulitzer, New York World mission statement, May 10, 1883, quote appears on The New York Times bronze plaque
--Steve Jobs
I think the same goes for newspapers. They are businesses that make money from giving people what they want, and like all businesses they eventually care primarily about making money. Whatever else they were founded to care about is secondary at best.
That's objectively described by "guzzle".
I'm sure they work up a sweat but probably not on the same order of magnitude
If they have successfully avoided what they consider "externalities" thats a different matter. Like, polluting.
Would have appreciated a bit more context too. This sounds very serious, but how does it compare in energy use per land area across countries? Or in absolute use? Maybe Ireland is just small? Maybe not very densely populated? Maybe efficient in its energy use otherwise? Maybe all of these?
I also find the tone interesting. It's as if there was a threshold being approached [0], or if the rate was accelerating. But it's kinda the opposite?
> Their share rose to 23 percent in 2025 after passing 20 percent in 2023 and 14 percent in 2021
So from 2021 to 2023 (+2 yrs) the jump was 6pp, and from 2023 to 2025 (also +2 yrs) was 3pp... meaning the expansion rate in usage share has slowed to a half? I could easily imagine a similar article celebrating. Once again though, visual: https://imgur.com/a/0eR3bl6 -- using the actual raw data instead. Basically what the article should have been. You can see the amount of change attributable to DCs being higher than 2025 from 2020 through 2023. 2024 was a significant drop, and 2025 is between the two.
And what's with the random timeskips for the absolute data? Here's 2015, 2019, 2024, 2025, but not 2023 (only %), not 2022, not 2021 (only %), etc. So annoying. If we're throwing numbers around, then let's do it properly gents. The data is all available ^^ [1]. No need for untraceable quotes from a spokesperson; literally just a few clicks and a handful of agent prompts.
[0] Not only is there of course no threshold to speak of, the entire narrative framing is up in the air. Why does it matter how much electricity DCs use (in absolute or relative terms), and who does it matter to? Ireland's electricity use energy mix was recorded to be a suspiciously tight majority "green" in 2024 at least: https://www.iea.org/countries/ireland/electricity - could use all the energy they wanted if it was green energy, no?
what is the alternative? I don't think self hosting is a robust/defensible option for a majority of internet services
I predict it will last all of two days.
You see the mentally ill chaos unfold within hours when DNS or a CDN goes down. Imagine taking their datacenter-dependent toys away for more than a day.
How will they navigate job interviews (in between datacenter protests) without relying on ChatGPT to feed them answers?
Sounds like a circular dependency to me.
Yes, datacenters are critical internet infrastructure. But in Ireland they're more like a sailing ship with the sails mounted underwater, because that's cheaper for tax reasons.
> it is estimated that in 2024, of the order of ~€104bn in annual GVA, 876,000 jobs and €14.6bn in annual employment related tax was enabled by the availability of digital infrastructure provided by data centres located in Ireland.
Seems like the economics of hosting these data centers benefits Ireland substantially, even with their tax breaks.
(technically: FANG taxes in Ireland, in violation of OECD treaties, is 12.5%, and for other very large companies 15%. If your company is not at least a certain size, and you haven't transferred "company IP" into Ireland during a certain window that's now closed, other taxes that don't increase with revenue will raise effective tax to as high as 55% for sole traders. And the actual FANG income is mostly generated in France and Germany, who have 25% and 30% company tax rates respectively, with some other EU countries higher still. In other words, this is the tax system billionnaires salivate about: it's a regressive tax, specifically designed to make the ultra rich richer, and push everyone else's wealth down hard, even people outside of Ireland)
PLUS the income tax lost for both other EU countries and employees, because for most FANG employees, this is also a tax increase (assuming they chose to move to Ireland rather than stay in the Netherlands or elsewhere in the EU)
I mean we should unite against this! This system is making literally everyone in the EU poorer compared to the US tech sector. From an unemployed Romanian in a long term care facility to a French billionnaire. All are losing money through this system.
I'm so exited finding someone like you! I'm much like Ireland. I was born desperately poor. My parents gave me second hand presents on , if that. I couldn't pay for my school things back then. I got "support" of child services until I, quite literally, threw them out (down a staircase to be exact), and then decided to study and fix things myself. I'm decently rich now, but not rich enough. Given that you support people just stealing because of not-valid past grievances ... Where do you live and where do you hide the cash?
Ireland isn't stealing from other people by changing their tax policies to attract business, that isn't theft by any stretch of the imagination outside of a libertarian one that posits all taxation is theft.. and you haven't answered my question: Why should Ireland change their tax policy to benefit other (much larger) governments?
It's fairly insulting that you've described the Irish as thieves, something Europeans have done for centuries, just because you want more tax revenue for other, much larger, governments.
Which is deeply unfair, from two main perspectives:
1) everyone should be taxed the same. Big, small, local, global, ... it should not matter (if anything global should be taxed more than local)
2) it only works because everyone's tax revenues go down a lot, which means yet again the rich escape taxes
3) it makes something like EU corporate tax initiative, which is horrible (it involves an extremely complicated way of attributing specific transactions to specific locations and then taxing them locally. However, like the EU VAT initiative it's main problem is how complicated it is)
> everyone should be taxed the same
Ireland, as a sovereign nation, gets to decide their own tax policy.
None of this is theft, you're just maligning Ireland for their choice of tax policy, something they're entirely within their rights to decide without external influence.
I think we're at an impasse.
I think there are some serious caveats here, such as Ireland signing both the OECD minimum tax treaty, then doing this anyway. I feel like that's at the very least dishonest.
It is, ah, probably about the best location if you want connectivity to both the US and continental Europe (and also, oddly, Japan, via an arctic cable). A big fraction of total transatlantic connectivity goes through Ireland, and there's substantial redundancy.
However, realistically, today datacenters are mostly built in Ireland because there are already datacenters in Ireland. There are no significant tax benefits to building them in Ireland vs most other countries, power is more expensive, and planning is more difficult (a lot of proposed datacenters for Ireland are now being refused planning, due to either grid constraints or dirty backup power arrangements). But, say, eu-west-1 is the biggest European AWS region, so why, as an Amazon customer, wouldn't you use it? (This is also a thing with us-east-1, which I think is still their biggest region despite their attempts to nudge people away from it to east-2...)
Expansion by _existing_ datacenter operators, who came in ages ago when the connectivity advantage was more of a big deal, seems to be the major driver. I don't think anyone who doesn't already have datacenters in Ireland is trying to build them; these days there are other locations with appropriate connectivity, cheaper power, and less fussy regulators.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/business/china-russia-ai-...
Dude thats highly unlikely to be LLM training. If anything its cloud. And its cloud because Ireland has been deliberately making itself an attractive place for large businesses to invest.
>In 2016–17, foreign firms paid 80% of Irish corporate tax, employed 25% of the Irish labour force (paid 50% of Irish salary tax), and created 57% of Irish OECD non-farm value-add.
Other people have spilled enough words here that it should be obvious if you read other comments on this thread that Ireland has ridiculously tiny energy grid. The other part of the picture is that the deliberately court foreign multinationals.
Suddenly sitting bolt upright in your chair and screaming "LLMS!!!!!" makes no sense at all.
I believe this is due to the concentrated population centers needing to subsidize the transmission to the least populated areas, and would guess this would have an impact on energy costs for data centers in Canada. But again, my experience is (mostly) limited to SW Ontario, where everything is fairly expensive.
Ontario's relatively high costs are from the supply mix which is about 50% nuclear, 30% hydro, 10% wind, 10% gas.
Residential kWh as delivered is currently (no pun intended) about 12 US cents which is a bit high if you're used to Midwestern or Alberta coal but those in California are probably envious.
Alberta doesn't have any coal power plants afaik.
[0]: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/alberta-genesee-2-off...
What should they do in the meantime?
China seems to do 7 years _build time_ at ~$3bn/GW. So you're probably looking at at least a decade project start to end. Also, they're primarily using a reactor that isn't licensed in Europe and won't be anytime soon. The only Chinese plant using a European-licensed reactor type (EPR) took a decade to build (still faster than European builds of the same reactor, but not what you'd call quick).
Sure enough France exports up to about 4GW to the UK, and the UK exports up to about 1GW to Ireland. Right now, it being the middle of the night here, France sends us about 2.5GW and we sent Ireland about 500 MW.
Electricity being fungible by nature it doesn't really mean anything to say that's French electricity when it reaches Ireland, it could just as easily be British nuclear, or wind power from a Scottish wind farm, or any number of sources or any mix.
It's also a two-way flow; while UK<>Ireland transmission tends to net out to UK->Ireland, it's fairly variable; to a large extent whichever side currently has too much wind is the donor.
Current government plans don't seem to take this into account. 40GW of wind power doesn't seem like "basically enough" when you're doing 10GW exports.
They did at least ban "rebidding" where you get permission to build a wind farm, but you think the price you agreed to isn't what you'd prefer so you just bid again next time like nothing happened. Some of the projects which low balled are now stuck, either build it as promised and collect a smaller profit than you'd hoped for or fuck off, no second chances
The HVDC line to France will help with this; it will less frequently be very windy in Ireland and the UK _and_ France.
Longer term, though, everywhere is going to need a lot more storage (and possibly smart variable demand; remains to be seen how practical that is at scale.)
But it is in itself fairly non-trivial; HVDC cables that long are difficult.
In 20 years time the same response will be spouted, it will make you wish you did something 20 years before when it was originally discussed.
I'm still not versed enough on the environmental impacts of batteries. There is a lot of battery tech advancements in the past decade.
Nor the law banning nuclear for electricity generation.
Nor the attempt this year to reverse that law which got defeated.
Ireland appears to not want nuclear ;)