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Campaign groups are calling for a moratorium on new data centres while industry groups don’t want Ireland to lose out on foreign investment and AI development.
There are many ways in which Ireland is an outlier when it comes to global tech. Home to an astounding number of of global tech giants’ European headquarters, Ireland also has a thriving start-up scene for its size, with one of the world’s most active state-backed VC investors.
Thanks to a high rate of employment, low corporate tax rate and abundance of local tech talent, Ireland presents itself as a strong contender for Europe’s tech hub. Even amid the global AI rush that everyone is talking about, Dublin has gained favour: OpenAI and Anthropic, both at the frontlines of generative AI advancement, have chosen to open offices in Ireland’s capital.
But there is one more, rather unfortunate, way in which Ireland is becoming an outlier. A surge in the construction of data centres across the country is putting pressure on the national grid – with data centres now consuming more than a fifth of Ireland’s electricity.
And according to Jerry Mac Evilly, head of policy at Friends of the Earth, existing policies in Ireland are failing to ensure data centres operate within climate limits.
“Ireland is an outlier, with data centres projected to consume as much as 30pc of total electricity by 2030,” Mac Evilly said recently. His comments came days after the Central Statistics Office (CSO) revealed last month that data centres now consume 21pc of Ireland’s metred electricity, up from 18pc in 2022 and a significant jump from the 5pc share it held in 2015.
This means data centres have now overtaken urban dwellings, which dropped one percentage point to 18pc in 2023. Meanwhile, rural dwellings kept steady at 10pc.
“This is why Friends of the Earth is calling for a moratorium on new data centre developments until the Government establishes a robust legislative and regulatory framework to prevent further increases to electricity and fossil gas demand,” said Mac Evilly.
“The argument is pushed that data centres are a necessary evil. But who is really benefitting from their expansion? Why is this energy guzzling industry continuing to expand in Ireland at a time when we know that Ireland needs to rapidly reduce energy demand both on security and climate grounds?”
Rising demand
He has a point. As of last summer, the Republic of Ireland – a country with a population of approximately 5.1m people – was home to 82 operational data centres, with an additional 14 under construction and 40 with planning approved. Demand for data centres has surged ever since the advent of a global AI race to build the most advanced large language models, or LLMs.
Some of the Big Tech companies building data centres in Ireland include TikTok, with one of its two Dublin-based Project Clover sites operational, and Amazon, which secured planning permission to build three new data centres in Dublin last September.
In June, Google said it will increase its data centre capacity in Dublin through an expansion of its current Grange Castle site. The company revealed plans to build a 72,400 sq m data storage facility at the Grange Castle Business Park in Dublin 22, where it already has two data centres.
Nearly a week after this announcement, the tech giant revealed that its carbon emissions have grown by nearly 50pc compared to 2019 levels, attributing this increase to a rise in energy consumed by its data centres and supply chain emissions amid the global AI boom, as the company’s data centre electricity consumption grew by 17pc last year. However, the company also claimed that its data centres maintained a “100pc global renewable energy match”.
Ireland’s FDI hopes at risk
Big Tech companies such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft have all previously warned that Ireland has much to lose economically if the Government doesn’t find a way to balance climate goals with allowing data centres to grow. For one, data centres are crucial to the training and development of advanced AI models. Then there’s the foreign direct investment that comes in with their development.
In May, a group of 10 Irish data centre developers and operators called Digital Infrastructure Ireland asked the Government to set up a working group to start a discussion on issues related to the sector.
“Ireland needs to commit to certainty on its data centre policy quickly, otherwise it will miss the next phase of investment into digital developments, having lost the first wave of it over the last two years,” said Peter Lantry, chair of the group, told RTÉ at the time.
“Without swift and direct action on this uncertainty, Ireland’s position as a welcoming hub for foreign direct investment and a global technology leader is at risk, just as investment in AI is scaling around the world. If the uncertainty continues, particularly in the Dublin metro area, it will reshape Ireland’s standing as a choice destination for prominent global projects.”
But according to Rosi Leonard, network development coordinator at Friends of the Earth, the unsustainable rise of data centres in Ireland puts our climate goals at risk and calls into question “who our energy systems are for”.
“We need to prioritise taking expensive and unhealthy fossil fuels out of our homes and communities. Not only are data centres gobbling vast amounts of renewables for private profit, but we should also be deeply concerned about their prolific water consumption,” Leonard said.
She referred to Meta’s Clonee data centre, which as of 2021 used more water than a large town the size of Mullingar. “This more than any other Meta data centre in the world,” Leonard said.
“Allowing Ireland to be used for unfettered data centre expansion puts a just transition for communities at risk and also risks creating an unjust scenario where the rest of us face expensive fossil fuel bills while private industry enjoys clean energy. We need to shout stop.”
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