Ireland embraced data centers that the AI boom needs. Now they're consuming too much of its energy
Dozens of massive data centers are consuming more electricity than all of the urban homes in Ireland and starting to wear out the warm welcome that brought them here
CLONDALKIN, Ireland — Dozens of massive data centers humming at the outskirts of Dublin are consuming more electricity than all of the urban homes in Ireland and starting to wear out the warm welcome that brought them here.
Now, a country that made itself a computing factory for Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and TikTok is wondering whether it was all worth it as tech giants look around the world to build even more data centers to fuel the next wave of artificial intelligence.
Fears of rolling blackouts led Ireland's grid operator to halt new data centers 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 center expansion threatens Ireland's goals to sharply cut planet-warming emissions.
Ireland is a “microcosm of what many countries could be facing over the next decade, particularly with the growth of AI,” said energy researcher Paul Deane of University College Cork.
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 center clusters. It could get even bigger were Adelaide not a thorn in the side of Google’s expansion plans.
“It’s kind of an outrageous number of
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