In recent years, the annual DataCentres Ireland conference at the RDS was an optimistic event. Ireland, specifically Dublin, was viewed as a data centre capital of the world and there was something of a gold-rush quality to the presentations and panel discussions. But the mood has dropped, at least for now.
Last week, the conference was characterised by frustration regarding the moratorium on grid connections, what new LEU (large energy user) policy could look like and the existential issue of what data centres are all about: power. Data centres go where the power is. Industry growth in Ireland is now being outpaced across Europe, notably by Spain and the Nordics.
Some old narratives persist. The industry insists that if electricity is being generated, it needs a buyer, and data centres can be that customer. The growth in renewables can feel less positioned as a green transition – fossil-fuel power replaced by renewable energy – but as creating more power to use more power. The data-centre industry insists it is a driver of the renewable energy industry. As a soft orchestral version of Radiohead’s Idioteque was played over speakers between talks, the usual grievances about how data centres are covered in media also persisted.
With our electricity grid under pressure, two themes emerged, both about bypassing the grid. One was using gas for baseload power and building gas power plants on site, with generator (traditionally diesel) backup power. Another was industry enthusiasm for proposed private wires policy; the upcoming major rewriting of legislation to allow data centres to connect directly to energy sources, bypassing the grid.
READ MORE
When one speaker asked members of the audience how many were concerned about fines coming down the line for Ireland failing to sufficiently reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 – penalties reaching as much as €28 billion – one person put their hand up. That person was me.
New developments are still breaking ground, such as Echelon’s massive project in Wicklow. This is a €3.6 billion project, €1.4 billion more than the budget for the National Children’s Hospital. The plans say it will be powered by a biogas power plant and connected to a wind farm. An application for a 15.7 hectare solar farm was refused planning permission over concerns that too few jobs would be created on employment-zoned land. The move away from traditional centres of data-centre development (such as Dublin) is a Europe-wide trend. Regional data-centre development is a land, energy and connection hunt.
There are existential issues surrounding the next generation of artificial intelligence (AI) data centres. AI is a hubristic industry, but the vast roll-outs of AI data centres at scale are real and the impacts are mind-boggling.
The projected power and energy demands of AI data centres need to be put in context, however unrealistic they may seem. For example, OpenAI, a company at the heart of the so-called AI bubble, says it intends to build data centres of 250 gigawatts of compute capacity by 2033. This is equivalent to the amount of electricity it takes to power India.
Three new OpenAI data centres planned for Texas, New Mexico and the US midwest equate to 5GW. Meta is building a 5GW data centre called Hyperion in Louisiana.
To put those figures in context, Ireland’s target of offshore wind deployed and connected to the electricity grid by 2030 is 5GW. Data centres in Ireland consume 22 per cent of metered electricity, compared to the European average of three per cent. While the current data-centre boom across Europe is still mostly about conventional cloud, there are also major AI-related data-centre investments happening in Europe. Microsoft will invest $10 billion in a 1.2GW data centre in Sines in Portugal, running 12,600 Nvidia Graphics Processing Units (GPUs).
Given Ireland’s current energy context, our capacity to join the AI data-centre race through massive build-outs of this scale is not currently realistic. The question is whether it should even be a goal. What would we actually be capitalising on, beyond creating huge demand for energy we’re struggling to generate and dispatch, when what we should focus on is the need to transition from fossil fuels completely?
Big Tech and AI companies – now also effectively energy companies – are increasingly turning to nuclear, with another race on to develop and install small modular reactors (SMRs). The UK is also betting on nuclear, building its own Rolls-Royce SMRs in Wales, much to the chagrin of the US, which wanted the American company Westinghouse to manufacture the UK’s SMRs.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is planning to make tonnes of Cold War-era plutonium available to fuel the AI data-centre boom. One company in the mix is Oklo, a nuclear start-up whose former chair is OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman.
For obvious reasons, Ireland isn’t and won’t be part of the nuclear conversation. But the difficulty for Ireland is also a microcosm of the broader AI data-centre energy dilemma: the energy needs of data centres is a square peg and the energy context is a round hole. Maybe the reason this isn’t being solved by these great tech innovators is because it actually can’t be. Maybe they’re repeating something familiar: moving fast and breaking things.
