By Matt O’brien | Ap Technology Writer CLONDALKIN, Ireland—Dozens of massive data centers humming at the outskirts of Dublin are consuming more electricity than all of the urban homes in Ireland and starting to wear out the warm welcome that brought them here.
A worker sits inside the control centre of the Digital Realty data center, in Dublin, Ireland, Thursday, Oct. 17, 2024. CLONDALKIN, Ireland—Dozens of massive data centers humming at the outskirts of Dublin are consuming more electricity than all of the urban homes in Ireland and starting to wear out the warm welcome that brought them here.
Ireland is a “microcosm of what many countries could be facing over the next decade, particularly with the growth of AI,” said energy researcher Paul Deane of University College Cork.Twenty-six-year-old activist Darragh Adelaide lives in a working-class Dublin suburb just across a busy motorway from Grange Castle Business Park, one of Ireland’s biggest data center clusters. It could get even bigger were Adelaide not a thorn in the side of Google’s expansion plans.
Still, buildings that for years went mostly unnoticed have attracted unwanted attention as their power demands surged while Irish householders pay some of Europe’s highest electricity bills. Ireland’s Environmental Protection Agency has also flagged concerns about nitrogen oxide pollution from data centers’ on-site generators—typically gas or diesel turbines—affecting areas near Dublin.
In June, Adelaide’s campaign against data centers helped get him elected to a seat on the South Dublin County Council for the leftist People Not Profits Party. The council soon after rejected Google’s plan to build another data center. Google appealed the decision in September. “When we look at artificial intelligence, when we look at new technologies coming along the line, the basic requirement for all of those is power infrastructure,” said Dermot Lahey, who directs Digital Realty’s data center implementation in Ireland, speaking inside a cavernous empty data hall. Ireland has all the elements to make it a “great home for AI expansion,” he said.
“The bog started disappearing and it wasn’t being replaced,” said Sheridan, walking along a boardwalk over carpets of moss and sedges in the now-protected Clara Bog Nature Reserve. “Bord na Móna, as far as I’m concerned, are a law unto themselves,” Sheridan said. “Now that the turf-cutting is all finished, they should be gone. But it’s still the same Bord Na Móna and they won’t answer questions.”
On the other side of Offaly, a group of residents who live along the Lemanaghan Bog near the site of a 7th-century monastery are skeptical of such claims. They are opposed to what a proposed Bord Na Móna wind farm will do to its cultural heritage and ecology. “We’re all for change,” said Gerard Whelan. “I’ll get work because I build houses. It’s a domino effect.”
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