Ireland Wanted to Build Data Centres for the AI Boom. Now They Fear Blackouts

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Ireland wanted to build data centres for the AI boom. Now they fear blackouts:

Dozens of data centres humming at the outskirts of Dublin are consuming more electricity than all of the urban homes in Ireland.

And now they are starting to wear out the warm welcome that brought them here.

Ireland is a country that made itself a computing factory for Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and TikTok. It is wondering whether it was all worth it as tech giants look around the world to build even more data centres to fuel the next wave of artificial intelligence.

Fears of rolling blackouts led Ireland's grid operator to halt new data centres 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 centre 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 centre 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 data centres," Adelaide said. "People have started to make the connection between the amount of electricity they're using and electricity prices going up."

Ireland has attracted global tech companies since the "Celtic Tiger" boom at the turn of the 21st century. Tax incentives, a highly skilled, English-speaking workforce and the country's membership in the European Union have all contributed to making the tech sector a central part of the Irish economy. The island is also a node for undersea cables that extend to the U.S., Britain, Iceland and mainland Europe.

Nearly all of the data centres sit on the edge of Dublin, where their proximity to the capital city facilitates online financial transactions and other activities that require fast connections. Data centre computers run hot, but compared to other parts of the world, Ireland's cool temperatures make it easier to keep them from overheating without drawing in as much water.

Still, buildings that for years went mostly unnoticed have attracted unwanted attention as their power demands surged while Irish householders pay some of Europe's highest electricity bills. Ireland's Environmental Protection Agency has also flagged concerns about nitrogen oxide pollution from data centres' on-site generators - typically gas or diesel turbines - affecting areas near Dublin.

A crackdown began in 2021, spurred by projections that data centres are on pace to take up one third of Ireland's electricity in this decade. Regulators declared that Dublin had hit its limits and could no longer plug more data centres into its grid. The government urged tech companies to look outside the capital and find ways to supply their own power.

"What's happening in Ireland is the politics of basically what happens when you build too many of these things," said University College Dublin researcher Patrick Brodie. "Even though people have recognized for a while that data centres are energy hogs, there hasn't really been so many of these moments where, effectively, Ireland issued a red alert."

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