Data Centres: Why Ireland is being sold to Big Tech

By Aaron Ó Sceacháin

The 130 data centres currently operating in Ireland guzzle obscene amounts of electricity. In the same week that Uisce Éireann instigated a hosepipe ban across large swaths of the country, data centres used millions of litres of water, enough to supply thousands of households. They are a stark reminder that, under capitalism, the needs of the Irish public will always be secondary to those of overseas corporations and tech giants.

The numbers are staggering: 21% of our electricity grid is now used for data centres, a figure not far off the usage of all Irish households at 25%. This is at a time when Ireland has by far the highest electricity prices in Europe at over 40% the EU average. Data centres contribute to these soaring costs; a report by Dr Seán Farron estimates that they have cost Irish households an average of €263 between 2021-23, or €715 million cumulatively. If the Government’s policy of encouraging the unfettered expansion of data centres is allowed to progress, then over 30% of our electricity grid could be given over to data centres by 2030.

Dodgy propaganda

The situation is so egregious that in a recent UN report, Ireland was labelled a ‘cautionary example’ for the dangers of letting AI and data centre expansion chew up a country’s energy resources at the expense of its citizens. Despite this, the Government seems only more invigorated in its pursuit of selling our energy to US billionaires. In a dazzling piece of propaganda titled “The Value of Data Centres to Ireland”, they make the claim that data centres underpin 876,000 jobs and €104 billion in ‘gross value added’ to the economy. These lunatic figures attribute basically every job that makes use of IT systems to data centres and imply that the Irish economy would effectively collapse without them. In truth, the most reliable figures estimate 3,300 permanent staff in direct employment at data centres, while they siphon money from the working class through increased energy bills.

Their impact on the working class is not only financial. It is estimated that 90% of data centres in Dublin are located in economically deprived areas which are already struggling with a lack of services and a never-ending housing crisis. Their energy demands warp ‘public’ services towards private corporations. Now, when the Government speaks of infrastructure development, it is not talking about a Western railway or improved flood defences or anything that could materially improve the lives of the Irish people – it is talking about pipes, cables and money funnelled towards complex cloud computing and AI.

The fossil fuels burned for their electricity consumption exacerbate the warming climate and ecological collapse we are all feeling the effects of. So, if they’re of no benefit, and deeply harmful to almost everyone on this island, why is there such a scramble to build more?

An AI Continent

In 2025, the European Union unveiled its strategic plan to transform Europe into an ‘AI continent’. The plan aims for an explosion in data centre construction across the EU in order to “shape the future of AI in a way that enhances our competitiveness, safeguards and advances our democratic values and protects our cultural diversity.”

Bluntly, this corporate jargon is nonsense and an insult to our collective intelligence. AI proliferation only strengthens the power of billionaires at a time of unprecedented wealth inequality. It subverts democracy by subordinating the needs of ordinary people to the interests of multi-national corporations and tech giants such as Amazon, Meta and Palantir. It destroys human life through its use in mass surveillance programmes, disinformation, war and genocide. It is used in sophisticated algorithms which automate job cuts during a severe cost of living crisis. The images it creates are at best hideous approximations of human art – and at worst child pornography. This is what Ireland’s data centres truly underpin.

Solidarity calls for an immediate and complete ban on the building of new data centres. We stand with, and are encouraged by, community groups across the country who have politically organised to protect our environment from these digital parasites. There is an urgent need to emulate their struggle against the further expansion of data centres and to bring digital infrastructure and big tech companies into democratic public ownership and control. For these resources to be left in the private ownership of capitalist billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel spells disaster for our planet and humanity.

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