Posted by Bender 4 hours ago
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...
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 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...
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.
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.
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.