Why are there so many data centres in Ireland?

If you read the news, you will probably know that data centres use a lot of resources, especially energy and water. These warehouses of the ‘cloud’, which house rows of servers processing global internet activity, have come to the forefront of contemporary discourses surrounding the sustainability of the tech industry. The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) especially has caused a proliferation of debate about the astronomical energy usage of large- scale computing. The expansion of the tech industry's server requirements shows no signs of slowing. What began a few years ago as a relatively minor criticism of the tech industry from the likes of Greenpeace International (2017) has now become central to the ‘sustainable’ strategies and policy considerations of all major tech companies and states as they double- down on the highly speculative promises of generative AI. While some commentators fret over the existential threat of sentient robots, the far more material and present threat of AI's resource requirements is poised to derail any slim hopes of decarbonisation and a liveable planet for the majority. Channelling the accelerationist attitudes of Silicon Valley, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt casually dropped in 2024 that the energy demand for AI was infinite and, since we were never going to meet our climate goals anyway, we may as well bet on building AI to solve the problem (Woodcock 2024). This AI will require the construction of thousands of data centres to accommodate expanding computational needs.

This is not the tech- fantasy hubris of one man, or even a few powerful tech companies – it is the beating heart of capitalist eco- modernity.