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

https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2026/07/11/irish-datacenters-now-guzzle-23-of-the-countrys-electricity/5270013

by Bender • 10 days ago

247 301 10 days ago

thegrim33• 10 days ago

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?

ralusek• 10 days ago

Guess if people who write articles like LLMs

toomuchtodo• 10 days ago

"Unwanted industrial users consuming over 1/5th Ireland's electricity."

(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)

trollbridge2• 10 days ago

Yeah, but Ireland has a looser regulatory environment where it’s easier for a data centre operator to buy off the relevant government regulators.

alephnerd10• 10 days ago

data centers do not belong in Ireland...

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...

zzgo• 10 days ago

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

JumpCrisscross2• 10 days ago

objectively reporting facts?

I believe so. They're not known for neutrally reporting them, which is different.

alephnerd10• 10 days ago

They basically re-report press releases. I've dealt with The Register as well as their sister publications back when I was still in product (especially during shudder RSA).

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.

coldtea2• 10 days ago

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.

fc417fc802• 10 days ago

It's called a value judgment and an emotionally charged tone. That's certainly a form of editorial but IMO not the good kind. If an outlet seeks to advocate for a cause it ought to do so in a well reasoned manner and with a professional tone.

kevinpet• 10 days ago

Editorials are a thing. This is not an editorial. It's structured as a news report.

fabian2k• 10 days ago

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

peab3• 10 days ago

there's an unnatural amount of doomerism against datacenters, of exactly this kind. It's pretty obviously astroturfed.

Kon5ole2• 10 days ago

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

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.

hunterpayne19• 10 days ago

That opinion should be informed by facts and data. This opinion isn't really informed by anything except scientifically illiterate propaganda. That's the problem. Journalists larping as experts in something that they have absolutely no expertise or even the basic scientific background to understand. The amount of misinformation on topics surrounding energy generation is absolutely criminal and journalists are far and away the biggest spreaders of misinformation on this topic. If I could, I would make a journalist without scientific or engineering credentials talking about this topic a felony on par with murder. After all, they are causing significant amounts of misery in the 3rd world with their lies.

onel3• 10 days ago

Not really, no. It is one of the most important attributes of good journalism that you have to be as impartial. That's why papers have separate sections for Opinions

egypturnash• 10 days ago

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.

kazinator• 10 days ago

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

That's objectively described by "guzzle".

mikestew• 10 days ago

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

hinkley14• 10 days ago

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.

anigbrowl2• 10 days ago

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.

onel3• 10 days ago

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

illwrks• 10 days ago

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

alephnerd10• 10 days ago

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.

teamonkey5• 10 days ago

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.

alephnerd10• 10 days ago

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-...

breppp3• 10 days ago

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

alephnerd10• 10 days ago

It's not misappropriation. Other countries within the EU could be much more business incorporation and FDI friendly, and IDA Ireland tends to be one of the more competent trade promotion agencies within the EU.

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...

matttttttttttt• 10 days ago

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

pizzafeelsright• 10 days ago

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

JumpCrisscross2• 10 days ago

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.

stuaxo• 10 days ago

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

henry20232• 10 days ago

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

hinkley14• 10 days ago

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)

paleotrope• 10 days ago

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

hackerSkoolRoot• 10 days ago

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

hahahaa3• 10 days ago

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

infinite_spin6• 10 days ago

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

naturalmovement• 10 days ago

Maybe we ought to take away society's Spotify etc. and go back to trading cassettes.

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.

spwa45• 10 days ago

Nobody hosts datacenters in Ireland because of capacity reasons. It's not a good location for power, people or connectivity. They host them there for tax reasons. You can bet your firstborn these datacenters are only the exact size that is the minimum allowed by tax law, not a square millimeter more.

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.

pbgcp20266• 10 days ago

Tapes. Trackloads of them. Ferries with lorries with tapes. You know, the European GDPR compliant way. /s

Aachen• 10 days ago

Why wouldn't you be allowed to?

pnw• 10 days ago

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-...

pbgcp20266• 10 days ago

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

hahahaa3• 10 days ago

Is 22% of energy generation of a country needed to serve services needed for that country? I mean it starts sounding like blockchain at that point.

protocolture7• 10 days ago

How are datacenters not critical internet infrastructure?

zeofig• 10 days ago

Some data centers, sure. 23% of the country's energy worth? I don't think so. Training LLMs is not critical digital infrastructure.

hahahaa3• 10 days ago

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

EwanToo• 10 days ago

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

j453• 10 days ago

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

apercu• 10 days ago

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.

j453• 10 days ago

The post above seems to point to Alberta as the best value prop.

retrac• 10 days ago

Quebec has a larger grid and lower rates due to its abundant hydroelectricity.

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.

dmix• 10 days ago

Energy prices are cheaper in Canada as a whole than the US which is cheaper than Europe. While China it's still significantly cheaper that those since they invested in every sort of energy instead of fighting it.

lemmox• 10 days ago

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.

j453• 10 days ago

It seems like local power generation is OK too in Alberta, meaning Natural Gas or Solar on-site without needing to connect it to the grid.

thewanderer1983• 10 days ago

Guzzles or sensibly sips?

HtmlProgrammer2• 10 days ago

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

hunterpayne19• 10 days ago

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

Keloran• 10 days ago

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

s1artibartfast9• 10 days ago

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.

dymk• 10 days ago

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.

mvdtnz2• 10 days ago

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.

dyauspitr3• 10 days ago

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

IncreasePosts• 10 days ago

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

hinkley14• 10 days ago

Being poor is expensive.

simonw• 10 days ago

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

WheatMillington• 10 days ago

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.

socialcommenter• 10 days ago

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.

onel3• 10 days ago

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.

HtmlProgrammer2• 10 days ago

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

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

mrb2• 10 days ago

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.

testing223213• 10 days ago

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?

hunterpayne19• 10 days ago

Sure, $1B for the plant and $19B for the lawyers. Korea and China build them in 4 years for about $1B each. This is entirely self-inflicted by people who are completely scientifically illiterate.

mrb2• 10 days ago

Or Ireland can import electricity from France TODAY as we export on average 10 GW continuously, and most of it is already generated by nuclear :-)

HDBaseT2• 10 days ago

Better than kicking the can down the road. Energy is effectively always going to be needed.

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.

gib444• 10 days ago

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 ;)

perching_aix• 10 days ago

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/

cbmuser• 10 days ago

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.

anigbrowl2• 10 days ago

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

pbgcp20266• 10 days ago

- To fix these two planks you take a hammer and a nail ... - NO! My uncle hit himself with a hammer real hard last year. It is "is a non-starter". Can we use glue? - Yes, it will be more expensive, less efficient ... - NO! My niece inhaled glue last year. It is "is a non-starter". Can we ... <Light goes out. Conversation continues in a darkness>

dingaling• 10 days ago

Yet they're happy to take nuclear-generated electricity from France...

HDThoreaun2• 9 days ago

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

mrtksn8• 10 days ago

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

hinkley14• 10 days ago

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.

mrtksn8• 10 days ago

I think its obvious from the context what kind of plastic surgery, the vanity one.

olelele• 10 days ago

He's talking about highly educated doctors taking jobs in private clinics instead of working in public hospitals for less.

s1artibartfast9• 10 days ago

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.

slowin2• 10 days ago

You are entitled to a benefit from your tax dollars being spent. Otherwise, it's just theft.

syntaxing• 10 days ago

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.

mrtksn8• 10 days ago

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.

carbocation• 10 days ago

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

hx82• 10 days ago

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.

HDThoreaun2• 9 days ago

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.

protocolture7• 10 days ago

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.

mrtksn8• 10 days ago

It's not important whose fault it is, I am sure that the datacenter people believe that they got such a good deal and everything is peachy.

hudo• 10 days ago

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!

Schiendelman6• 10 days ago

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

s1artibartfast9• 10 days ago

depends on where you are. In some parts of California you are out $10-20k just for the permitting and panel upgrade.

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.

lavela• 10 days ago

We need global minimum tax.

cadamsdotcom3• 10 days ago

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.

rogerrogerr2• 10 days ago

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.

twelve402• 10 days ago

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

cadamsdotcom3• 10 days ago

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.

AussieWog932• 10 days ago

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.

protocolture7• 10 days ago

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.

mrtksn8• 10 days ago

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.

_3u102• 10 days ago

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.

cma• 10 days ago

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.

unknownfuture• 10 days ago

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.

erentz2• 10 days ago

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.

vishalontheline• 10 days ago

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

alephnerd10• 10 days ago

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.

dzhiurgis2• 9 days ago

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

disgruntledphd22• 9 days ago

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.

eucryphia• 10 days ago

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.

soco• 10 days ago

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

jmyeet• 10 days ago

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.

twelve402• 10 days ago

Who pays for that? Not the data center

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

cadamsdotcom3• 10 days ago

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

Don't you ever stop to wonder why?

ksec• 10 days ago

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.

1vuio0pswjnm72• 10 days ago

"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

1vuio0pswjnm72• 10 days ago

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

oliwarner• 10 days ago

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.

pbgcp20266• 10 days ago

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 ...

paddim8• 9 days ago

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

Waterluvian• 10 days ago

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?

morepork• 10 days ago

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.

ggm• 10 days ago

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.

halyconWays• 10 days ago

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.

psd16• 10 days ago

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.

bawana• 10 days ago

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.

arjie• 10 days ago

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.

psd16• 10 days ago

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.

librasteve• 10 days ago

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

dyauspitr3• 10 days ago

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

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

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