In my imagination, Ireland persists an image of lushness, with green fields full of babbling brooks. Leaving Dublin airport (briefly) affirms this vision, with the road to the city centre passing by fields with horses nibbling on the rolling countryside. But on my recent quest from Dublin Airport to Mountjoy, I was surprised by a quick visual shift. These fields are followed immediately by massive, windowless, gray block buildings. Data centres!
This is the new image of Ireland, the country home to the world’s highest concentration of data centres. Data centres are facilities that house IT infrastructure, responsible for storing, processing, and managing digital data. The changes in Ireland reflect the global growth of AI and connected industries, which are having marked environmental effects. How did Ireland become a global hub for data centres, and what are the consequences of this?
For more than a decade, Ireland has been the EU headquarters for tech companies. Major firms like Amazon, Google, and Meta set up headquarters in the country, due to financial incentives like a low corporate tax rate and access to the European Union. The companies brought thousands of high value jobs, and contributed to government tax revenues, establishing Ireland as a leader in the digital economy. Worldwide, the UN found that AI infrastructure captured over $270 billion in foreign direct investment. Companies alone are expected to spend $500 billion on data centres in 2026, according to investment bank UBS. Countries’ governments value data centres as strategic infrastructure that enable other sectors, which typically prioritise capital investment and profit.
Although there was an initial embrace of data centre construction in Ireland, there has been major public backlash that has resulted in changing laws and legislations. Authorities have limited the building of new data centres in the greater Dublin area because of “significant risk” to power supplies, as 97 per cent of data centres in Ireland are clustered in the greater Dublin area. There are many reasons for this, including connection points around Dublin to an undersea fibre optic cable that links to American cloud systems.
Currently, 21 per cent of Irish electricity goes to powering data centres. In the next few years, a third of Ireland’s electricity is predicted to go to data centres. This is up from just 5 per cent data centre energy use in 2015. Activists and regulators warn that demand may soon outpace energy supply. “There is a risk that the pace of demand growth is faster than the speed of which generation and network infrastructure can be built”, said a spokesperson for the country’s energy regulator, the Commission for Regulation of Utilities.
The environmental implications are more than just the sheer amount of electricity demand. The energy used for these centres is also not renewable, instead coming from traditional fossil fuel powered sources, with Goldman Sachs research estimating that 60 per cent of global power demand for data centres will be sourced from natural gas. By 2030, this will add 215 to 220 million tons of global carbon emissions. In Europe, the electricity required for this infrastructure is reversing more than a decade of falling power demand.
Water consumption is also a major concern, as data centres consume large amounts of the precious resource. In Meta’s data centre in Meath, the building uses more water than any other Meta data centre in the world. A single data centre in one day can use almost as much water as an Olympic size swimming pool, more than 500,000 gallons of water. This water is necessary to cool the computer equipment and to prevent overheating. Unlike most water, water used in data centres does not return into the water reuse cycle. The water used for the cooling systems becomes water vapour and escapes into the atmosphere. While the water thus remains part of the wider water cycle, it is lost from the municipal water system. There is also indirect water usage in the operation of data centres, such as the water used for cooling when burning fossil fuel to create electricity.
Ireland’s Minister for Climate, Energy, and the Environment, previously stated that data centre construction was moving to countries that have the most welcoming policies. As constraints about energy availability reveal themselves, tech companies will instead move to places with more available energy, bringing with them the capital associated with these large projects. Although there are limitations on data centres near Dublin, Irish developers are still trying to expedite the approval of sites in more rural areas like Co Clare and Co Mayo. Despite growing public outcry against data centres, the activism has not been translated to legislative wins. Instead, activists hope their actions will deter companies from building more data centres.
From a simple economic perspective, it makes sense to try to increase Irish involvement in the fastest-growing industry in the world. But the way these are being put into practice are not sustainable and have both direct short and long term effects on the environment and society. It could be argued that the costs imposed on Ireland are now outweighing the benefits of being Europe’s top hub for data centres.
There are ways to sustainably develop and power data centres, but these are not being done in Ireland. Instead, Ireland has been a test case for unregulated large-scale expansion. This unchecked growth is destroying Ireland’s goal to meet its 2030 climate targets. As AI markets expand globally, Ireland is a prime example of the environmental and infrastructural reverberations that coincide with fueling the future of the digital age.
