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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
Anyone with half a brain can see that destroying the public internet is a very very bad thing. I now have to half assume you are a bad faith argument by a bot.
The good information is again being siloed to hide it from the scrapers, destroying a massive amount of value.
Poisoning the well of human trust is one of the worst things you can do to society.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
The National Health Service Corps (NHSC) Scholarship Program and Indian Health Service Scholarship Program will pay for medical school in exchange for agreeing to work in underserved areas for several years. Some states have similar programs. I'm not sure how you would even begin to calculate ROI for that.
It's complex and imperfect, but in this situation the most direct ROI would be the cost of recruiting a newly graduated doctor by increasing the salary until someone accepts compared to the cost of providing the scholarship.
There was an article posted on HN recently about the asymmetry in cost of providing an ambulance service vs the cost of the per-ride service. The cost of a medical degree, and the training on top of the degrees, may seem waaay too high but I am sure that when you need the service you want it to be there. I think if I break a leg, need an emergency surgery, etc I will be okay with $0.00001 of my taxes going into the pile needed for paying off those $500k loans.
One of the teachers I know had to pay for 7 years past their forgiveness date of 10 years teaching because of the student loan shenanagains in the early 202's and then the shutdowns. Luckily finally she got the loan closed ans is still waiting on the 10% back for paying over.
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.
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.
Exactly. In countries with medical tourism this not only pushed the doctors to work for tourists instead of the local population that sponsored their education but also the brightest doctors to do things like botox, nose job or hair transplant because its incredibly lucrative. Fields that deal with stuff like cardiovascular deceases or children have become leftover fields where only the idealists and those who couldn't get into the cosmetic stuff specialize.
the grandparent commentor provided examples to illustrate 1 idea. you took one of those examples and showed how it could be used to illustrate another idea. thats fair enough. in your second comment you continued drilling this point without expounding upon it and without referring to the original topic. hence it seems you aren't interested in the overall conversation, rather whatever point you are trying to make. im not trying to be pejorative here, it is legitimately my perspective that the only thing you added to the conversation was collateral damage itself, by annoying someone enough for them to get muted.
Okay, fair enough. But once we stop doing things entirely because we are jealous of how some people use it, everything gets a bit dimmer.
I'm all for pricing externalities in. There are some obvious ways to do that with plastic surgeons on scholarships. There are ways to do that with natural resources and power generation and distribution. There's also perhaps space for making deals with the government where load shedding occurs in the data centers, not unlike how the power companies deal with foundries and such.
not sure if you have enabled dead comments or not, somebodys comment was killed for calling you pedantic. anyway nose jobs and skin grafts are both done by a plastic surgeon; one of these procedures saves lives and the other doesn't. the argument is that the taxpayer should prioritize life saving over vanity projects. accusations of jealousy make it seem as though you have missed the point entirely, whether intentionally (which would make the muted person correct) or not
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.
My taxes aren't "money given without strings attached". They are payment for services that benefit myself and others in the community. They're not a free gift for the government to hand out, that's theft.
No, student loans are not slavery for two reasons. First, the borrower agreed and signed a contract. Second, the debt owner is the one calling it due.
This is substantially different than expecting control on how debt free doctors or engineers spend their time or what jobs they work.
The crux of this is that externalty price analysis is only useful when bounded by real harms and property rights. Otherwise, anyone can call anything they dont like an externality: If my employee quits for a better job- Externality! If a woman wants to go home to their family instead of having sex with me - Externality!
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.
Yep, seen a data-centre move happen at work (from a distance - I wasn't effected). For a business with cross-data centre redundancy and no allowable down-time for core business, it was at least a year-long project I think. All for a data-centre in the same city.
They do pay tax, 12.5%. Plus employment during construction and maintenance. There's also ancillary investment in national infrastructure such as Google's CO2 battery
The rest of Europe sued Ireland to get them to stop being a tax haven. Ireland basically refuses to do so. If they did, most of their economy evaporates overnight (and the US government gets a lot more tax revenue). Ireland's economy is basically 2 tax shelters in a trench coat.
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)
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.
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.
- 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>
I know this is supposed to be a joke, but you are making a category error if you conflate hitting your thumb with a hammer with running a nuclear power plant.
One of the problems with nuclear is that, for practical and security reasons, you are dependent on an authoritarian regime to run the plant -- a plant that will be inherently not-transparent for the same reasons.
That means you have to trust the authorities in question to tell you the truth about risks like accidental discharges of radioactive waste. In the case of Ireland, which has a long history of being disenfranchised, the trust is understandably broken.
This makes building a new nuclear plant and having it run in your country by the same powers that screwed you over before with the same technology a non-starter.
It seems you didn't read the Sellafield article. If you want to be intellectually honest, I'd suggest starting there. (or at least with the "Incidents" section)
And if anyone is wrong, they will only have to deal with it for 20-50 years, then they die and the next 5000 administrations have to deal with the literal fallout.
If your uncle hitting his thumb meant everyone in his line and all of his neighbors would have a flat thumb for the next million years then the government would absolutely involve itself in hammer design and operational safety guidelines.
Exhibit 1: Why West will lose on AI – they will run out of power. LOL.
Thanks to commenters. (teachrdan and hinkley)
Yes, I know the reasoning. I am one of those who is against nuclear power stations, Chernobyl and Fukushima are too vivid.
But. If we don't "re-industrialise" the West, we die in a cold and darkness. Literally. We already killed marine ecosystem in Black and Caspian seas. Moving as planned in Gulf. With amount of oil tankers just burning out in the open the "carbon emission" goals seem like a joke. And still – we keep crippling our industry with all this ... I am tempted to say "nonsense", but it's not. It's actually right thing to do but we "outmaneuvered" ourselves out of right things. Now we have to deal with survival – economy first, people later.
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
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.
That makes it worse! A euro is worth about 10% more than a dollar.
Ireland has a lot of oil in their power mix from what I'm seeing, so that makes a bit of sense.
Maybe the high power cost is why they're deploying ~600GWh of new wind capacity per year for the last 15 years. Because at those rates the wholesale prices should be able to subsidize a lot of loans.
We don't measure capacity in GWh, we measure it in GW. And if Ireland had 600GW of wind, their entire island would be surrounded by a forest of windmills. Also, Ireland lacks any energy storage so none of that wind can be used for baseload, only variable load.
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.
Correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't PG&E charge one rate for the first ?? kwh and then more for the rest? Perhaps OP made a mistake of using the base rate (which you will blow past if you have too many computers or AC)
They do and how they do the price tranches has changed a lot in the last 5 years. It used to be 4 tranches, 10, 20, 30 and 40. It was very hard to get into the 20 tranch for a single home (maybe if you were bitcoin mining or something). Now the tranches are multiple times higher and its easier to get into the higher tranches. Look on PG&E's website for the specifics.
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.
Not really. There is a standard rate and then the companies are required by the state to offer an opt in low income tier.
There was a push a year or two back to make it fully income based, where you would have to give the power company your w2 to determine your rate, but it was rejected (for now)
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.
I mean, if you own a house (you cant put solar on the roof of something you don't own), you probably do have access to loans. Houses make great collerateral.
Not neccesarily saying it makes economic sense to get a loan to install solar, just that homeowners usually aren't the poor class that saying usually applies to.
How many people do you know who own a house? Not a mortgage, own.
The housing market is such that a lot of people are overextended, and the mortgage market encourages people to change their definition of 'enough' house which makes it worse again.
The fact that I don't have solar on my roof is substantially my own fault. I moved in a year after a subsidy ended and it contributed to my procrastination. But then my power grid is comparatively cheap and comparatively renewable, which also contributes.
But I know a lot of people who know a lot of people who can't even stay on top of keeping their expected house repairs up. And that's also an investment in energy and your time and having construction people in your personal space for 2x as long as they estimated it would take.
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.
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!
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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].
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.
Undercutting other countries on tax policy tends to piss them off. So it comes down to whether the benefits of the policy outweigh the blowback.
The 13% of GDP figure can be a bit misleading as GDP from being a tax haven tends to help the average irish citizen a lot less than more traditional ecconomic activity.
eh, other countries can improve their offering. It's a good thing. We punish companies when they collude to keep salaries low. So too should countries compete with attractive tax packages.
Or they could use coercive measures to punish the countries undercutting them. There is no world police after all to prevent them.
A big reason why capitalism works is 2 factors: its easy to start competitors and established players are not allowed to shoot up and coming companies. Neither apply to countries.
I'm not arguing about whether its a good thing or not, just that it is the way the world works. Whether or not Ireland's policies are a good idea depends on how much value they capture vs how much value they lose due to their consequences, chief among them being the strain such policies can put on foreign relations & trade.
> The 13% of GDP figure can be a bit misleading as GDP from being a tax haven tends to help the average irish citizen a lot less than more traditional ecconomic activity
As I pointed out, if Ireland didn't adopt it's tech FDI policy which it did in the 1990s, it would be a much poorer country today.
Going from Libyan, Soviet, and Greek to Finland level living standards in 30 years was not guaranteed, and it was Ireland's business friendly policies is what ensured it became a tech hub today and didn't fall into the middle income trap - especially in 2008-12 when Ireland was also in the midst of a Greece style economic meltdown (remember the PIGS?)
Ireland was a developing country in the 1990s, and if they executed better than then much richer Western European states like Germany, France, the UK, and Canada then so be it.
> GDP from being a tax haven tends to help the average irish citizen a lot less than more traditional ecconomic activity.
I've been using HDI which isn't severely impacted by GDP per capita.
And even then, Ireland's median household income [0] is now significantly higher than the UK [1] despite living standard in the UK having been significantly higher than Ireland's until the 2010s because of Ireland's FDI policy.
> Undercutting other countries on tax policy tends to piss them off
Other EU member states such as Poland and Czechia also match Ireland's incentives when asked, which has helped both Czechia and Poland now catch up to historically richer France, Italy, and the UK.
> As I pointed out, if Ireland didn't adopt it's tech FDI policy which it did in the 1990s, it would be a much poorer country today.
Perhaps, but if you want to measure the effect it had on ordinary Irish people you should be using GNI not GDP. I'm not saying it had no effect, just that GDP is a misleading measure.
>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.
Or to 0.005% if you're Apple.
>The Commission's investigation concluded that Ireland granted illegal tax benefits to Apple, which enabled it to pay substantially less tax than other businesses over many years. In fact, this selective treatment allowed Apple to pay an effective corporate tax rate of 1 per cent on its European profits in 2003 down to 0.005 per cent in 2014.
A parking structure owned by a shopping center might offer free parking in order to drive business goals. That's as much a policy as it would be if they were to charge a fee.
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 ...
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.
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?
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
>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.
Credibility is a thing. Articles like this burn it quite quickly. It really is past time that the scientific community needs to make a public statement rejecting these types of "journalists".
That's the thing, the popular impression is that this is the case. But if you read what scientists actually wrote/said you would realize that what science says and what activists and journalists claim science says are quite different. That's why its almost impossible for a journalist to get a quote from a scientists on this topic anymore. Its also why there are almost no scientists who are members of "green" political entities (eg Sierra Club) anymore. Did you see a quote from a scientist in this article? When was the last time you saw one?
Your post doesn't have a reply link for some reasons but here is my response. What they need is expertise in energy generation. They need to understand concepts like a duck curve, power storage and its material requirements, relative EROEI of various power generation sources and a basic understanding of when newer forms of generation are likely to be ready. For instance, they should understand that renewables need to be well sited. They need to understand that the solar albino of Ireland is (far) too low for solar PV to be effective. Things of this nature. Engineering things around energy generation and the physics of how a grid works. If you don't understand these things, you are throwing darts at a dart board when you try to provide analysis of various types of industrial infrastructure.
This article reports that Irish data centres use a particular percentage of the countries power.
> What they need is expertise in energy generation.
Okay, so an actual Electrical Engineer with grid scale experience.
> They need to understand concepts like a duck curve, power storage and its material requirements, relative EROEI of various power generation sources and a basic understanding of when newer forms of generation are likely to be ready.
Many people with a STEM background understand these things .. they are not generally called "scientists" in Commonwealth English.
Also, I don't want a different article, I want one informed by someone who has a real understanding of these topics. For example, if a datacenter is in Washington state, fresh water (and its fresh water we care about here) isn't consumed. In Ireland, probably some is consumed. This is because of wind patterns and where water vapor will be carried to from the datacenter. If its carried over land, fresh water isn't consumed. If its carried over ocean, then it is. Stuff like this is why you actually need knowledge of the issue, and not just an understanding of datacenter cooling systems.
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.
“I have given up on American journalism. The decline of the American press has long been obvious, and my time is too valuable to waste in an effort to supply the ‘man in the street’ with his daily quota of clichés, gossip, and erotic tripe. There is another concept of journalism, which you may or may not be familiar with. It’s engraved on a bronze plaque on the southeast corner of the Times Tower in New York City.”
—Hunter Thompson, letter to William Kennedy, 1959
“An institution that should always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty.”
—Joseph Pulitzer, New York World mission statement, May 10, 1883, quote appears on The New York Times bronze plaque
In case you didn't know, The Register has been deliberately using this kind of language about ALL topics for nearly 30 years. It's part of their appeal and brand, like The Onion. People choose to read The Register because they have this adversarial stance and humorous tone about tech.
The vast majority of the pro-datacenter 'externalities don't matter as long as I make money' is also pretty obviously astroturfed.
The difference is that much of the communication on that end happens in backchannels, directly with the regulators, in secret meetings, without any possibility of public scrutiny.
(When that isn't enough, the firehose of paid advertisements gets fired up to convince the public, instead.)
The vast majority of the anti-datacenter movement is funded by the CCP. That's why it is so lacking in facts. Most datacenters use closed loop cooling. That means it doesn't consume water for anything more than the toilets and water fountains. Yet this talking point pops up in almost every article on the topic. Part of the reason you are seeing closed door meetings now is because leaders know that the public is profoundly misinformed on this topic. It doesn't help when AOC is waving a jar of dirty water as if it is proof of something.
They all have a closed cooling loop, but almost all of them cool the exterior condensers with an open cooling loop.
Which draws from the watermain, sprays water on the hot condensers, the water evaporates, cooling the condensers. This is done to reduce their electric bills, because condensers operate more efficiently when they are cold.
The fully closed-loop data center, with air-cooled condensers is the exception, not the rule. Because it sucks even more electricity than a regular one, due to its less-efficient cooling.
You are spreading falsehoods, while also accusing people who are factually accurate of being foreign propaganda mouthpieces. This is at best, ironic and jingoistic, and at worst...
Do you honestly think that the very detailed understanding of cooling systems that you have has anything in common with the popular opinion that datacenters use lots of water?
Also, you are arguing jargon...and data centers use completely closed loop designs where it makes sense (very cheap power) and use what you describe where it makes sense (with more expensive power and cheaper water). Finally, nothing you said disproves that there is a significant propaganda effort to demonize datacenters by a foreign power.
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.
Objectively, yes. It means to consume excessive or plentiful amounts of something, and 23% of Ireland’s electricity generation capability is objectively an excessive and plentiful amount.
Objectively no, 23% of nothing is nothing. Ireland has no industry. Their grid is smaller than a major city's grid. That this is 23% says a lot more about the size of the Irish grid and their lack of industry than it does about how much energy a datacenter uses.
The characterization as “excessive” is subjective. If you disagree, what are your objective criteria for making that claim? You fundamentally can’t give a correct answer to that, because it requires defining a threshold, and that’s subjective.
If people seriously think claims like this are “objective”, I weep for our collective understanding of reality.
Of course it’s excessive. Questions should be asked about any one industry using 23% of a nation’s generating capacity, when it was not built for this purpose.
Of course it’s excessive. Ireland’s electricity is not cheap or in such plentiful supply that homes are not affective by this. These data centres are driving up the electricity prices for everyone in Ireland.
Of course it’s excessive. There are only 80 datacentres that used 7.8TWh between them in 2025. That amount of power is used by only the heaviest of industries; it’s 3x more power than the UK steel industry uses, for example.
Of course it’s excessive. The amount of energy used means that more fossil fuels is being used to power them than would otherwise be necessary. Legislation has been written so that new datacentres must in future provide their own [fossil fuel] generators. This in a time of man-made climate change where we all urgently need to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. It’s not just excessive, it’s deeply irresponsible.
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.
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 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.
"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)
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.
Lol the word guzzle in this context is just objectively spin. It's fine, especially because it's so transparent, but it only takes reading 4 words to know the position of the article on the situation.
They consume a huge amount of the country's electricity not only for no clear benefit to society, but mostly for making it worse, with more social media posts, stupid videos, surveillance, advertising-led consumption, ai slop
As compared to productive uses, like lighting, food preservation, home warming, medical use, transport, and useful manufacturing.
Did they pay market rate? Are they negatively affecting the other consumers through some unpriced externality? If they're such a burden then why is the government tolerating them?
it's dead accurate for you because it aligns with your ideas on the subject.
if it had been for defense or some other such thing the media outlet wanted to celebrate it'd have been worded "Our defense apparatus sips only 23% of the country's power!"
tl;dr : accuracy isn't what aligns to personal interests, and journalists who choose to use language like this are (generally speaking) disinterested in accuracy and honesty as top priorities.
Accurate is what reflects reality. Reality isn't neutral. Some things are bad, and worsen society, and others are good.
"Neutral reporting" presents a false equivalence between different options that seldom are equal.
And of course itself is based on an "idea on the subject": that the role of reporting is to have no values aside from information transmission.
The specific objection is even more bizarre: yes, if it was for something else it would have been worded differently. That's like there being a car accident described as "tragic" and someone objecting that if it was a wedding or a sports win that had happened instead they'd have described them as positive. Sure. Because they're different things.
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.
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.
If you were to look at a map you'd see that Ireland is on the other side of a bigger island.
Sure enough France exports up to about 4GW to the UK, and the UK exports up to about 1GW to Ireland. Right now, it being the middle of the night here, France sends us about 2.5GW and we sent Ireland about 500 MW.
Electricity being fungible by nature it doesn't really mean anything to say that's French electricity when it reaches Ireland, it could just as easily be British nuclear, or wind power from a Scottish wind farm, or any number of sources or any mix.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The good information is again being siloed to hide it from the scrapers, destroying a massive amount of value.
Poisoning the well of human trust is one of the worst things you can do to society.
Commensurate with their costs, including externalities? That very much remains to be seen.
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.
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.
Don't you ever stop to wonder why?
uh... how? they do pay for what they use.
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 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.
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R44970
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.
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.
I'm all for pricing externalities in. There are some obvious ways to do that with plastic surgeons on scholarships. There are ways to do that with natural resources and power generation and distribution. There's also perhaps space for making deals with the government where load shedding occurs in the data centers, not unlike how the power companies deal with foundries and such.
(what was this about getting muted?)
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.
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.
It might be evidence that you or your government isn't benefiting you with its spending. That doesnt put obligation on the recipient.
This is substantially different than expecting control on how debt free doctors or engineers spend their time or what jobs they work.
The crux of this is that externalty price analysis is only useful when bounded by real harms and property rights. Otherwise, anyone can call anything they dont like an externality: If my employee quits for a better job- Externality! If a woman wants to go home to their family instead of having sex with me - Externality!
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
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield#Incidents
One of the problems with nuclear is that, for practical and security reasons, you are dependent on an authoritarian regime to run the plant -- a plant that will be inherently not-transparent for the same reasons.
That means you have to trust the authorities in question to tell you the truth about risks like accidental discharges of radioactive waste. In the case of Ireland, which has a long history of being disenfranchised, the trust is understandably broken.
This makes building a new nuclear plant and having it run in your country by the same powers that screwed you over before with the same technology a non-starter.
It seems you didn't read the Sellafield article. If you want to be intellectually honest, I'd suggest starting there. (or at least with the "Incidents" section)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield#Incidents
If your uncle hitting his thumb meant everyone in his line and all of his neighbors would have a flat thumb for the next million years then the government would absolutely involve itself in hammer design and operational safety guidelines.
Thanks to commenters. (teachrdan and hinkley)
Yes, I know the reasoning. I am one of those who is against nuclear power stations, Chernobyl and Fukushima are too vivid.
But. If we don't "re-industrialise" the West, we die in a cold and darkness. Literally. We already killed marine ecosystem in Black and Caspian seas. Moving as planned in Gulf. With amount of oil tankers just burning out in the open the "carbon emission" goals seem like a joke. And still – we keep crippling our industry with all this ... I am tempted to say "nonsense", but it's not. It's actually right thing to do but we "outmaneuvered" ourselves out of right things. Now we have to deal with survival – economy first, people later.
edit: I live in Ireland
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.
Ireland has a lot of oil in their power mix from what I'm seeing, so that makes a bit of sense.
Maybe the high power cost is why they're deploying ~600GWh of new wind capacity per year for the last 15 years. Because at those rates the wholesale prices should be able to subsidize a lot of loans.
[1]: This alone will increase costs by something like 4c/kWh from these 70 year old dams: https://www.king5.com/article/news/investigations/skagit-riv...
My power is USD$0.271/kWh and I'm nowhere near Ireland.
https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/industries-and-topics/electrical-ene...
There was a push a year or two back to make it fully income based, where you would have to give the power company your w2 to determine your rate, but it was rejected (for now)
Not neccesarily saying it makes economic sense to get a loan to install solar, just that homeowners usually aren't the poor class that saying usually applies to.
The housing market is such that a lot of people are overextended, and the mortgage market encourages people to change their definition of 'enough' house which makes it worse again.
The fact that I don't have solar on my roof is substantially my own fault. I moved in a year after a subsidy ended and it contributed to my procrastination. But then my power grid is comparatively cheap and comparatively renewable, which also contributes.
But I know a lot of people who know a lot of people who can't even stay on top of keeping their expected house repairs up. And that's also an investment in energy and your time and having construction people in your personal space for 2x as long as they estimated it would take.
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?
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.
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.
If they have successfully avoided what they consider "externalities" thats a different matter. Like, polluting.
I'm sure they work up a sweat but probably not on the same order of magnitude
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-...
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...
Undercutting other countries on tax policy tends to piss them off. So it comes down to whether the benefits of the policy outweigh the blowback.
The 13% of GDP figure can be a bit misleading as GDP from being a tax haven tends to help the average irish citizen a lot less than more traditional ecconomic activity.
Or they could use coercive measures to punish the countries undercutting them. There is no world police after all to prevent them.
A big reason why capitalism works is 2 factors: its easy to start competitors and established players are not allowed to shoot up and coming companies. Neither apply to countries.
I'm not arguing about whether its a good thing or not, just that it is the way the world works. Whether or not Ireland's policies are a good idea depends on how much value they capture vs how much value they lose due to their consequences, chief among them being the strain such policies can put on foreign relations & trade.
As I pointed out, if Ireland didn't adopt it's tech FDI policy which it did in the 1990s, it would be a much poorer country today.
Going from Libyan, Soviet, and Greek to Finland level living standards in 30 years was not guaranteed, and it was Ireland's business friendly policies is what ensured it became a tech hub today and didn't fall into the middle income trap - especially in 2008-12 when Ireland was also in the midst of a Greece style economic meltdown (remember the PIGS?)
Ireland was a developing country in the 1990s, and if they executed better than then much richer Western European states like Germany, France, the UK, and Canada then so be it.
> GDP from being a tax haven tends to help the average irish citizen a lot less than more traditional ecconomic activity.
I've been using HDI which isn't severely impacted by GDP per capita.
And even then, Ireland's median household income [0] is now significantly higher than the UK [1] despite living standard in the UK having been significantly higher than Ireland's until the 2010s because of Ireland's FDI policy.
> Undercutting other countries on tax policy tends to piss them off
Other EU member states such as Poland and Czechia also match Ireland's incentives when asked, which has helped both Czechia and Poland now catch up to historically richer France, Italy, and the UK.
[0] - https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-silc/surv...
[1] - https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personal...
Perhaps, but if you want to measure the effect it had on ordinary Irish people you should be using GNI not GDP. I'm not saying it had no effect, just that GDP is a misleading measure.
Or to 0.005% if you're Apple.
>The Commission's investigation concluded that Ireland granted illegal tax benefits to Apple, which enabled it to pay substantially less tax than other businesses over many years. In fact, this selective treatment allowed Apple to pay an effective corporate tax rate of 1 per cent on its European profits in 2003 down to 0.005 per cent in 2014.
https://mastodon.ie/@handi/116900076149521593
what is the alternative? I don't think self hosting is a robust/defensible option for a majority of internet services
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.
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.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/business/china-russia-ai-...
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/
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.
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.
Alberta doesn't have any coal power plants afaik.
[0]: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/alberta-genesee-2-off...
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.
The article cited the latest figures from Ireland's Central Statistics Office (CSO).
There's little need here for Niels Bohr or a bleeding edge virologist to lean in on annual summary stats on civil infrastructure usage.
They certainly have BSc Mathematics types. What is the additional scientific discipline you think needs to weigh in here?
This article reports that Irish data centres use a particular percentage of the countries power.
> What they need is expertise in energy generation.
Okay, so an actual Electrical Engineer with grid scale experience.
> They need to understand concepts like a duck curve, power storage and its material requirements, relative EROEI of various power generation sources and a basic understanding of when newer forms of generation are likely to be ready.
Many people with a STEM background understand these things .. they are not generally called "scientists" in Commonwealth English.
Sure, but none of them work at the institution referenced by the article. That isn't what they do.
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.
—Hunter Thompson, letter to William Kennedy, 1959
“An institution that should always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty.”
—Joseph Pulitzer, New York World mission statement, May 10, 1883, quote appears on The New York Times bronze plaque
The difference is that much of the communication on that end happens in backchannels, directly with the regulators, in secret meetings, without any possibility of public scrutiny.
(When that isn't enough, the firehose of paid advertisements gets fired up to convince the public, instead.)
They all have a closed cooling loop, but almost all of them cool the exterior condensers with an open cooling loop.
Which draws from the watermain, sprays water on the hot condensers, the water evaporates, cooling the condensers. This is done to reduce their electric bills, because condensers operate more efficiently when they are cold.
The fully closed-loop data center, with air-cooled condensers is the exception, not the rule. Because it sucks even more electricity than a regular one, due to its less-efficient cooling.
You are spreading falsehoods, while also accusing people who are factually accurate of being foreign propaganda mouthpieces. This is at best, ironic and jingoistic, and at worst...
Also, you are arguing jargon...and data centers use completely closed loop designs where it makes sense (very cheap power) and use what you describe where it makes sense (with more expensive power and cheaper water). Finally, nothing you said disproves that there is a significant propaganda effort to demonize datacenters by a foreign power.
That's objectively described by "guzzle".
I believe so. They're not known for neutrally reporting them, which is different.
I don't have any problem with The Register, but reporting laden with value-judging adjectives is not objective.
If people seriously think claims like this are “objective”, I weep for our collective understanding of reality.
Of course it’s excessive. Ireland’s electricity is not cheap or in such plentiful supply that homes are not affective by this. These data centres are driving up the electricity prices for everyone in Ireland.
Of course it’s excessive. There are only 80 datacentres that used 7.8TWh between them in 2025. That amount of power is used by only the heaviest of industries; it’s 3x more power than the UK steel industry uses, for example.
Of course it’s excessive. The amount of energy used means that more fossil fuels is being used to power them than would otherwise be necessary. Legislation has been written so that new datacentres must in future provide their own [fossil fuel] generators. This in a time of man-made climate change where we all urgently need to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. It’s not just excessive, it’s deeply irresponsible.
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.
(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)
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...
They consume a huge amount of the country's electricity not only for no clear benefit to society, but mostly for making it worse, with more social media posts, stupid videos, surveillance, advertising-led consumption, ai slop
As compared to productive uses, like lighting, food preservation, home warming, medical use, transport, and useful manufacturing.
if it had been for defense or some other such thing the media outlet wanted to celebrate it'd have been worded "Our defense apparatus sips only 23% of the country's power!"
tl;dr : accuracy isn't what aligns to personal interests, and journalists who choose to use language like this are (generally speaking) disinterested in accuracy and honesty as top priorities.
"Neutral reporting" presents a false equivalence between different options that seldom are equal.
And of course itself is based on an "idea on the subject": that the role of reporting is to have no values aside from information transmission.
The specific objection is even more bizarre: yes, if it was for something else it would have been worded differently. That's like there being a car accident described as "tragic" and someone objecting that if it was a wedding or a sports win that had happened instead they'd have described them as positive. Sure. Because they're different things.
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 ;)
What should they do in the meantime?
Sure enough France exports up to about 4GW to the UK, and the UK exports up to about 1GW to Ireland. Right now, it being the middle of the night here, France sends us about 2.5GW and we sent Ireland about 500 MW.
Electricity being fungible by nature it doesn't really mean anything to say that's French electricity when it reaches Ireland, it could just as easily be British nuclear, or wind power from a Scottish wind farm, or any number of sources or any mix.
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.