Irish datacenters now guzzle 23% of the country's electricity

Just to be contrarian: what we're talking about is "electricity use from economic activity". This should be good for Ireland but they'll need to build energy capacity to keep up.

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.

Isn't this a similar issue of doctors raised by taxpayers money doing hair transplant and cosmetic surgeries instead of working in much less profitable hospitals with sick people or European scientists and engineers risen by public education working in American tech companies or super rich people from all over the world buying all the homes in London which is valuable not because of its resources but because of the people there and now causing housing problems?

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

That is about 3% of California's total energy usage

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

My electricity costs 34 cent per Kw/h and I can’t afford solar panels or a renovation to air to water heating while the government insists we shouldn’t use oil / coal anymore nor logs or turf to heat our homes

edit: I live in Ireland

Ireland has been a data center hub for decades - especially thanks to the IDA successfully wooing Microsoft back in 2007 [0], and it helped played a role in helping Ireland partially recover from the AIB and housing collapse back in 2008 and become the tech hub it is today. Heck, it was the corneestone of the IDA's tech FDI policy back then [1].

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-...

Ireland consumes roughly 40 TWh per year, that’s less than the production of four EPR reactors or two times Hinkley Point C.

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.

And got electricity price hike last year, and now few weeks ago again, from ~25c kwh, to around 35c kwh! They say its reliance on fossil fuels. Not just that, think Ireland has one of the most expensive broadbands in the EU!

A similar thing happened in greece, but not with data centers. The railroads, airports,shipping ports were privatized and bought by foreign investors. Now the money from those services leaves the country making the greek economy poorer and weaker.

A few years ago I was reading a recruitment report and was surprised to learn that Ireland is a large source of data scientists, so it’s no surprise really

How do the data center people protect their expensive data center from colossal rate hikes? They can’t just pick up and move.

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?

Is there a snowball effect where a big AWS region attracts more usage? Those snowballs are more significant in smaller countries?

The very first country in EU who will make electricity dirt-cheap will win the "Sovereign EU AI Tech" war. That includes produce cheap electricity, cutting the redtape and curbing the Unions mafia. So .. not happening. Back to the US ...

They chose to add the word "guzzle". They could have just written "Irish datacenters now use 23% of the country's electricity". But they made the editorial decision to add in "guzzle". What's the word for this type of propaganda, where they add in some sort of adjective that wasn't needed, in order to prime the reader on how to think/feel, rather than just objectively reporting the facts? What are the odds that the content of the article is objective and factual, given the decisions they made with the headline?

Good work by them. An incredibly clean use of power with strong revenue. As industries go, this is a pretty good use of land and energy.

I read this as 'Irish Dancers now guzzle....'

I'm sure they work up a sweat but probably not on the same order of magnitude

Do they pay for it, and the consequent infrastructure cost increases? If they pay full commercial rates or adjusted rates for behaviours which are net beneficial to the supply process, then isn't this just another form of revenue?

If they have successfully avoided what they consider "externalities" thats a different matter. Like, polluting.

This article could have been a stacked bar chart with a caption. Maybe even should have been. Matter of fact, here you go people: https://imgur.com/a/s9KZRuQ (yearly version with 2015 as the anchor: https://imgur.com/a/f9ypK4W) -- there's also another likely more illuminating chart below, focusing on the YoY differentials.

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?

[1] https://data.cso.ie/

Are we allowed post masto links? I'm an Irish techie. I shot a video about this. Sorry about the camera shake:

https://mastodon.ie/@handi/116900076149521593

Canada seems better positioned for datacenters since they can power them locally with a multitude of options and not impact the local grid.

Good, force the world to build more energy production and mandate all data centers have to be powered by solar+batteries.

Electricity exists to be used, and we have essentially infinite free energy from nuclear power. Why are we wringing our hands pretending like we're going to run out of electrons? The days of hauling and burning ancient organic material to generate power should be over, and all these guilt-based arguments fallaciously require you to accept that as a premise.

also they need the tax to pay for the Irish Navy to prevent Putin from cutting the fiber

We need global minimum tax.

Guzzles or sensibly sips?

Ah the old "country's worth of electricity" comparison... Keep in mind that Ireland's entire electricity needs could be covered by a one nuclear power plant (3.8 GW with 4 reactors). IOW, you could offload all Irish datacenters by connecting them to a single nuclear power reactor (~900 MW), a small building that has a footprint of under 50 x 50 meters for the reactor, and another of 100 x 50 meters for the generator.

Just to be contrarian: what we're talking about is "electricity use from economic activity". This should be good for Ireland but they'll need to build energy capacity to keep up.

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.

Of course value is created, the problem is that the value is not created for the people who endure the issues and the pricing is apparently wrong. It is similar to building a SPAM factory somewhere people live on pork, paying higher prices for the pigs and buy all the pigs but not enough for the people who sold you the pigs to use the proceeds to increase the number of pigs or replace them with some other source and as a result you just created a famine.

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.

> There IS value being created, or people wouldn't use the tools.

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.

> There IS value being created, or people wouldn't use the tools.

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.

And that's grand, but when these things contest for the same resources I use (electricity, natural gas, water, rolling countryside unblemished by pylons), and I already see my bills soaring from a pair of absolutely unnecessary wars, I worry.

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.

> It's misplaced to be angry about datacenters themselves. There IS value being created, or people wouldn't use the tools.

Commensurate with their costs, including externalities? That very much remains to be seen.

Spot on @cadamsdotcom

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.

Yeah this is just completely wrong.

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.

"Just to be contrarian: ..."

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

> There IS value being created, or people wouldn't use the tools.

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

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.

Well, speaking as an Irish citizen, the actual problem here is that we haven't built as much wind and solar as we were expecting to when many of those data centers were being developed.

Employees of construction companies, electricity companies and the data center, among others, all get paid, no?

So we hating exports now? Is this post-globalist forum now?

How do the data center people protect their expensive data center from colossal rate hikes? They can’t just pick up and move.

So has Ireland made an agreement with them in some way?

Is there a snowball effect where a big AWS region attracts more usage? Those snowballs are more significant in smaller countries?

Good work by them. An incredibly clean use of power with strong revenue. As industries go, this is a pretty good use of land and energy.

That is about 3% of California's total energy usage

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

If they have successfully avoided what they consider "externalities" thats a different matter. Like, polluting.

Good, force the world to build more energy production and mandate all data centers have to be powered by solar+batteries.

I read this as 'Irish Dancers now guzzle....'

I'm sure they work up a sweat but probably not on the same order of magnitude

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

[1] https://data.cso.ie/

Guzzles or sensibly sips?

also they need the tax to pay for the Irish Navy to prevent Putin from cutting the fiber

We need global minimum tax.

I assume that they sign up to long term contracts to secure the price of power.

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.

Yes, the largest regions get new services launched in them first, and the widest range of hardware, encouraging more people to use them.

I would have agreed with that two years ago, to the extent that crypto isn't mined in DCs. But AI is mined in DCs, and looks a bit frothy. Is it delivering value to someone? yes; is it delivering value in the round? jury is still out.

What fraction of Irish GDP is linked to datacenters? If I remember correctly from the pre-AI world, datacenters were at the heart of Dublin's industrial strategy, and they were credibly linked to a double-digit fraction of production.

I'm actually quite surprised that California only has 4x as many data centers, with CA having more than 7x the population (not to mention being pivotal in the Information Age)

edit: I live in Ireland

That's 7x the cost that I pay in the Pacific NW. Where are you?

It's crazy that people have to eat the long payback time to switch to renewable, while these wildly profitable (maybe?) data centers can just drink excessively from the grid or switch on natural gas turbines, and skip the lead times/upfront costs.

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.

For people outside of Ireland: these rates are not the norm. They are usually around 20-22. Can go down 17 if on special plans, or even 12 if you have an electric car.

At 34 cents per kwh how can you afford to not get solar?

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

In certain Asian countries, medical education is 100% covered but you must work at a public hospital for X years. I honestly think it’s very fair. If tax payers full funds your education, it should be mandatory to work in public services for X amount of years.

What kind of plastic surgery are you looking to gatekeep?

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.

>Pricing that doesn't account for externalities.

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.

The common thread in your examples is the idea of entitlements.

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.

A few years ago I was reading a recruitment report and was surprised to learn that Ireland is a large source of data scientists, so it’s no surprise really

Yep. IDA's services FDI model helped attract much of the tech scene that exists in Ireland today. In the 1990s and 2000s no one would have expected Ireland to become the tech hub it is today without the IDA's foresightedness.

I don’t really see the link between data scientists and datacentres, or even AI researchers and datacentres.

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.

[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-...

That and misappropriating a lot of the taxes of other countries in the process

If you're up to 35c/kWh, solar panels are almost definitely cost effective for you.

It's already dirt cheap in northern Sweden and northern Norway

Canada seems better positioned for datacenters since they can power them locally with a multitude of options and not impact the local grid.

I lived in Ontario for 18 years and found power to be quite expensive compared to the midwestern US state I lived in before and after.

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.

FB just put shovels in the ground on a datacenter in Alberta. Bringing a new nat gas plant online nearby but it's a little quicker to bring the DC on than the plant.

Quite right. I built my sodium reactor while the subsidies were in effect and only paid €4000. It's almost paid off already, and as a nice bonus, i get spent control rods, which attract wildlife.

You don't know about Sellafield, do you?

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 ;)

Sweet. Start building TODAY and it will be done in nothing less than 20 years for nothing less than $20 BILLION.

What should they do in the meantime?

Are we allowed post masto links? I'm an Irish techie. I shot a video about this. Sorry about the camera shake:

https://mastodon.ie/@handi/116900076149521593

> Dump #datacenters - they are not critical Internet infrastructure!

what is the alternative? I don't think self hosting is a robust/defensible option for a majority of internet services

You mention a "Chinese economic report". Are you aware the CCP has an active propaganda effort against Western data centers?

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/business/china-russia-ai-...

The last point is ... strange. Landfills / Datacenters analogy is far fetched and you do want *local* data if you want The Internet. You know, local regions / availability zones? Maximum availability? Cut undersea cables? Even for distributed Mastodon messaging ... LOL

How are datacenters not critical internet infrastructure?

Why wouldn't you be allowed to?

Excellent video. Thanks for making it. Thanks for sharing it.

Ireland consumes roughly 40 TWh per year, that’s less than the production of four EPR reactors or two times Hinkley Point C.

Nuclear power is a non-starter in IReland because the Sellafield nuclear plant in the UK emitted pollution of various for years but UK officials covered it up. The actual severity of the pollution is open to debate but the loss of trusthad a generational impact.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield#Incidents

Nuclear takes minimum 15 years to build. Even if they started in earnest theyd still have problems for over a decade

>What's the word for this type of propaganda, where they add in some sort of adjective that wasn't needed, in order to prime the reader on how to think/feel, rather than just objectively reporting the facts?

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.

Journalism is allowed to have an opinion, that doesn't make it propaganda.

> They could have just written "Irish datacenters now use 23% of the country's electricity".

That's objectively described by "guzzle".

Is The Register known for objectively reporting facts? If so, I have fundamentally misunderstood it for a quarter century.

I haven't found a single source of Irish power mix over time but what I did find suggests that the amount of renewable power in Ireland has been spiking aggressively in recent years. I see something like 15% in 2024 from one source and >40% in 2026 from another. One chart (which I just found reproduced on wikipedia) of wind power is going up at like 600 GWh per year.

The Register is famous for its jaundiced takes, which are a mix of journalistic cynicism and parody of the febrile language of the UK tabloid press. You are not meant to take it at face value.

I agree that this title is very opinionated. If the country would have created enough electricity, the percentage wouldn't be a problem

I see you've never read The Register before. Their whole value proposition is "here is computing news from cynical, snarky viewpoint". Their motto "Biting the hand that feeds IT" has vanished from the masthead but it's still in their footer.

First time reading The Register, is it? Because I would expect no less from such a pillar of journalism as them.

Guess if people who write articles like LLMs

That sort of economic activity drives inflation. Well before you consider maybe-effects like job reduction.

> It's misplaced to be angry about datacenters themselves. There IS value being created, or people wouldn't use the tools.

Commensurate with their costs, including externalities? That very much remains to be seen.

> There IS value being created, or people wouldn't use the tools.

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.

This might just be my bubble, but us there that much AI being used for girlfriends/scams, or even reels these days?

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.

No doubt, there's always some bad with the good. The counter is to ask about the proportions.

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.

data center = girlfriend bots = meth lab is a pretty wild connection to make.

Theres no reason for AI hate to bleed over to Data Center hate.

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.

Spot on @cadamsdotcom

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.

Now where did I hear them called "windmills" again, maybe it was related to golf courses...

Not exactly the spam example, but Ireland remained a net exporter of food during the potato famine. The good farmland went to cattle and things like that for export.

So we should allocate electricity to less productive uses to benefit people the most?

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.

"Just to be contrarian: ..."

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

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

For example, this is from another article in the The Irish Times:

"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

Yeah this is just completely wrong.

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.

All this adds up to it should have to pay tens of millions (and maybe as much as $100M/year) in taxes.

Ignoring the taxes part.

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.

For some reason Ireland's government is offering favorable conditions for datacenter construction.

Don't you ever stop to wonder why?

> Who pays for that? Not the data center

uh... how? they do pay for what they use.

Well, speaking as an Irish citizen, the actual problem here is that we haven't built as much wind and solar as we were expecting to when many of those data centers were being developed.

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.

I think that you might have some details wrong here.

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.

So we hating exports now? Is this post-globalist forum now?

Honestly kind of yes. The world is burning, and we can't keep growing like this. Tech optimism made some sense 20 years ago but a lot of us who have been here in that time are feeling pretty jaded.

Employees of construction companies, electricity companies and the data center, among others, all get paid, no?

See: “benefits in terms of capital spending + the few ongoing jobs created”

They get paid a rounding-error amount, and only during the brief construction and setup phase, compared to the total amount of money the thing is making for its owners.

The construction companies don't continue to get paid much after the construction is complete.

That's 7x the cost that I pay in the Pacific NW. Where are you?

At 34 cents per kwh how can you afford to not get solar?

For people outside of Ireland: these rates are not the norm. They are usually around 20-22. Can go down 17 if on special plans, or even 12 if you have an electric car.

Yes, the largest regions get new services launched in them first, and the widest range of hardware, encouraging more people to use them.

Guess if people who write articles like LLMs

I assume that they sign up to long term contracts to secure the price of power.

You mention a "Chinese economic report". Are you aware the CCP has an active propaganda effort against Western data centers?

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/business/china-russia-ai-...

The Register is famous for its jaundiced takes, which are a mix of journalistic cynicism and parody of the febrile language of the UK tabloid press. You are not meant to take it at face value.

First time reading The Register, is it? Because I would expect no less from such a pillar of journalism as them.

Quite right. I built my sodium reactor while the subsidies were in effect and only paid €4000. It's almost paid off already, and as a nice bonus, i get spent control rods, which attract wildlife.

> They could have just written "Irish datacenters now use 23% of the country's electricity".

That's objectively described by "guzzle".

Why wouldn't you be allowed to?

I don’t really see the link between data scientists and datacentres, or even AI researchers and datacentres.

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.

It's already dirt cheap in northern Sweden and northern Norway

I agree that this title is very opinionated. If the country would have created enough electricity, the percentage wouldn't be a problem

You don't know about Sellafield, do you?

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 ;)

I am going to assume based on the fact that the article is about Ireland, and Ireland uses the euro, the commenter is in Ireland

I'm in the PNW and I pay 11c/kWh (well, I would, if I didn't have solar). Seattle is 13c, King County averages 16c. Where are you paying 5c/kWh? That's exceptionally cheap.

Paying 50 cents here in California. Running the electric oven costs literal dollars. However, this isnt new. Im hoping the data centers bring more attention to our state run cartel and push it over a tipping point.

You pay $0.05/kWh? That’s insanely low and I though I had it good at $0.1/kWh.

A thread in which yet another American learns how ludicrously cheap the cost of living is in USA despite the constant neverending moaning.

My power is USD$0.271/kWh and I'm nowhere near Ireland.

What kind of question is that? Without knowing anything about the person's geography or local cost of solar, how can you make such a bold assessment of affordability? I live in New Zealand where the capital cost of solar is very expensive and the climate is OK-not-great for solar generation. Even at 30c/kwh the payback (without batteries) is still 15 to 20 years. Not an obvious choice, especially as the capital cost is still declining.

The Sam Vimes theory of socioeconomic unfairness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory

Being poor is expensive.

Actually as of July 1st it is now 38 cents. This is very much the norm

https://www.electricireland.ie/residential/news/detail/elect...

This is common for teachers in many US states too -- spend X years teaching where we need you the most and we cover your degree.

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.

That is essentially how it works in the US as well thanks to public service loan forgiveness for physicians.

Yep, that's common in many countries for doctors. Not much for anything else(maybe teachers too) and how much X is good enough is debatable.

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.

There are programs that work this way in the US too. Most doctors arent interested because the pay cut you take working for the poor hospitals/military for a decade arent worth the paid off loan.

Irelands big pull to these companies is to not tax them as much as other countries.

Even in the hypothetical that datacenters would double Ireland’s GDP what real positive impact would it have if they pay zero taxes?

I'm actually quite surprised that California only has 4x as many data centers, with CA having more than 7x the population (not to mention being pivotal in the Information Age)

California is not a great place to build data centers. If you need to service CA, there are better options