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.
Commensurate with their costs, including externalities? That very much remains to be seen.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
edit: I live in Ireland
[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...
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 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.
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)
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?
If they have successfully avoided what they consider "externalities" thats a different matter. Like, polluting.
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.
I'm sure they work up a sweat but probably not on the same order of magnitude
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-...
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 cones down to which is more important.
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 Libya to Finland level living standards in 30 years was not guaranteed.
> Undercutting other countries on tax policy tends to piss them off
Plenty of other EU member states such as Poland and Czechia also match Ireland's offers
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.
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?
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?
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.