They chose to add the word "guzzle". They could have just written "Irish datacenters now use 23% of the country's electricity". But they made the editorial decision to add in "guzzle". What's the word for this type of propaganda, where they add in some sort of adjective that wasn't needed, in order to prime the reader on how to think/feel, rather than just objectively reporting the facts? What are the odds that the content of the article is objective and factual, given the decisions they made with the headline?
"Unwanted industrial users consuming over 1/5th Ireland's electricity."
(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)
Objectively, yes. It means to consume excessive or plentiful amounts of something, and 23% of Ireland’s electricity generation capability is objectively an excessive and plentiful amount.
The characterization as “excessive” is subjective. If you disagree, what are your objective criteria for making that claim? You fundamentally can’t give a correct answer to that, because it requires defining a threshold, and that’s subjective.
If people seriously think claims like this are “objective”, I weep for our collective understanding of reality.
Of course it’s excessive. Questions should be asked about any one industry using 23% of a nation’s generating capacity, when it was not built for this purpose.
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.
None of your statements give objective conclusions, unless one accepts as premises the implicit value judgments and other subjective assessments they depend on.
It shouldn't surprise you to know that there are people who disagree with everything you're saying. Do you really believe they're all "objectively wrong"? That's the territory of religion - "only my beliefs are the real ones".
"Usual, proper, necessary, or normal" for what purpose?
For data centers, none of those adjectives are being exceeded, so it's not excessive. Ireland is not using more power to run its data centers than anywhere else is, for data centers of a similar size.
To justify the claim of "excessive", you need to define some standard against which that's being measured. That choice of standard is necessarily subjective.
Again, this attempt to reframe subjective claims as objective is an act of either ignorance (not understanding what "objective" means) or zealotry (believing your opinions are the only ones that can be correct, and therefore "objective".) Either way, you need to examine what you're claiming more closely.
I posted several metrics by which the power used by these data centres is ‘excessive’.
You’ve decided that those don’t matter and you’ve created some other metrics by which you could consider the power use typical.
But just because you’ve found a way to say that they’re typical in one way, that doesn’t mean they’re not excessive in another way. They do use power to excess in some ways, therefore it’s perfectly legitimate to describe them as excessive in that way.
Data centres’ power use is becoming a problem for multiple reasons. The problem isn’t going to be solved by denying that a problem exists, or by taking offense when an adjective is used that draws attention to said problem.
> zealotry (believing your opinions are the only ones that can be correct)
Objectively no, 23% of nothing is nothing. Ireland has no industry. Their grid is smaller than a major city's grid. That this is 23% says a lot more about the size of the Irish grid and their lack of industry than it does about how much energy a datacenter uses.
They basically re-report press releases. I've dealt with The Register as well as their sister publications back when I was still in product.
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 accounts for almost 3 years and accumulated 66K karma until I and a couple others complained about it.
>What's the word for this type of propaganda, where they add in some sort of adjective that wasn't needed, in order to prime the reader on how to think/feel, rather than just objectively reporting the facts?
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.
It's called a value judgment and an emotionally charged tone. That's certainly a form of editorial but IMO not the good kind. If an outlet seeks to advocate for a cause it ought to do so in a well reasoned manner and with a professional tone.
In case you didn't know, The Register has been deliberately using this kind of language about ALL topics for nearly 30 years. It's part of their appeal and brand, like The Onion. People choose to read The Register because they have this adversarial stance and humorous tone about tech.
The vast majority of the pro-datacenter 'externalities don't matter as long as I make money' is also pretty obviously astroturfed.
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.)
The vast majority of the anti-datacenter movement is funded by the CCP. That's why it is so lacking in facts. Most datacenters use closed loop cooling. That means it doesn't consume water for anything more than the toilets and water fountains. Yet this talking point pops up in almost every article on the topic. Part of the reason you are seeing closed door meetings now is because leaders know that the public is profoundly misinformed on this topic. It doesn't help when AOC is waving a jar of dirty water as if it is proof of something.
They all have a closed cooling loop, but they cool the exterior condensers with an open cooling loop.
Which draws from the watermain, is sprayed on the condensers, and is evaporated. This is done to reduce their electric bills.
You are spreading disinformation, while also accusing people who are factually accurate of being foreign propaganda mouthpieces. This isn't a great look.
A fully closed loop data center is the exception, not the rule.
Do you honestly think that the very detailed understanding of cooling systems that you have has anything in common with the popular opinion that datacenters use lots of water?
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.
exactly. All of the arguments I see against data centers are simply arguments against industrialization.
The dirty water bit is the most ridiculous thing. It's meant to paint the picture that the data centers themselves are using the water and dirtying it, when in reality the cause is the development of the actual buildings and infrastructure, which would happen with any industrial development!
No, not really. My comments are organic - they come from a place of frustration, seeing such trivially wrong arguments against data centers.
All the arguments I see against data centers are arguments against industrialization. There are also arguments against capitalism and wealth inequality, that I sympathise with.
“I have given up on American journalism. The decline of the American press has long been obvious, and my time is too valuable to waste in an effort to supply the ‘man in the street’ with his daily quota of clichés, gossip, and erotic tripe. There is another concept of journalism, which you may or may not be familiar with. It’s engraved on a bronze plaque on the southeast corner of the Times Tower in New York City.”
—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, May 10, 1883, quote appears on The New York Times bronze plaque
"When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a
conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But
when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks
are in business to give people exactly what they want."
--Steve Jobs
I think the same goes for newspapers. They are businesses that make money from giving people what they want, and like all businesses they eventually care primarily about making money. Whatever else they were founded to care about is secondary at best.
That opinion should be informed by facts and data. This opinion isn't really informed by anything except scientifically illiterate propaganda. That's the problem. Journalists larping as experts in something that they have absolutely no expertise or even the basic scientific background to understand. The amount of misinformation on topics surrounding energy generation is absolutely criminal and journalists are far and away the biggest spreaders of misinformation on this topic. If I could, I would make a journalist without scientific or engineering credentials talking about this topic a felony on par with murder. After all, they are causing significant amounts of misery in the 3rd world with their lies.
Not really, no. It is one of the most important attributes of good journalism that you have to be as impartial.
That's why papers have separate sections for Opinions
I see you've never read The Register before. Their whole value proposition is "here is computing news from cynical, snarky viewpoint". Their motto "Biting the hand that feeds IT" has vanished from the masthead but it's still in their footer.
I haven't found a single source of Irish power mix over time but what I did find suggests that the amount of renewable power in Ireland has been spiking aggressively in recent years. I see something like 15% in 2024 from one source and >40% in 2026 from another. One chart (which I just found reproduced on wikipedia) of wind power is going up at like 600 GWh per year.
The Register is famous for its jaundiced takes, which are a mix of journalistic cynicism and parody of the febrile language of the UK tabloid press. You are not meant to take it at face value.
A few years ago I was reading a recruitment report and was surprised to learn that Ireland is a large source of data scientists, so it’s no surprise really
I don’t really see the link between data scientists and datacentres, or even AI researchers and datacentres.
The data scientists aren’t the ones working in the data centres. There’s no real advantage to having the data they’re working on next door unless it’s extremely lag sensitive.
Local proximity of a datacentre is good for fintech, Netflix and gaming servers.
Ireland has been a data center hub for decades - especially thanks to the IDA successfully wooing Microsoft back in 2007 [0], and it helped played a role in helping Ireland partially recover from the housing crisis.
What fraction of Irish GDP is linked to datacenters? If I remember correctly from the pre-AI world, datacenters were at the heart of Dublin's industrial strategy, and they were credibly linked to a double-digit fraction of production.
They do pay tax, 12.5%. Plus employment during construction and maintenance. There's also ancillary investment in national infrastructure such as Google's CO2 battery
The rest of Europe sued Ireland to get them to stop being a tax haven. Ireland basically refuses to do so. If they did, most of their economy evaporates overnight (and the US government gets a lot more tax revenue). Ireland's economy is basically 2 tax shelters in a trench coat.
I'm actually quite surprised that California only has 4x as many data centers, with CA having more than 7x the population (not to mention being pivotal in the Information Age)
Nobody hosts datacenters in Ireland because of capacity reasons. It's not a good location for power, people or connectivity. They host them there for tax reasons. You can bet your firstborn these datacenters are only the exact size that is the minimum allowed by tax law, not a square millimeter more.
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.
> it is estimated that in 2024, of the order of ~€104bn in annual GVA, 876,000 jobs and €14.6bn in annual employment related tax was enabled by the availability of digital infrastructure provided by data centres located in Ireland.
Seems like the economics of hosting these data centers benefits Ireland substantially, even with their tax breaks.
Yes, at the cost of removing at least double, and for FANG companies about triple, the tax revenue from other EU governments. And that's just counting company tax (and only specific companies, ie. this is why the "billionnaire tax" is so low, well, this is the EU component of it)
(technically: FANG taxes in Ireland, in violation of OECD treaties, is 12.5%, and for other very large companies 15%. If your company is not at least a certain size, and you haven't transferred "company IP" into Ireland during a certain window that's now closed, other taxes that don't increase with revenue will raise effective tax to as high as 55% for sole traders. And the actual FANG income is mostly generated in France and Germany, who have 25% and 30% company tax rates respectively, with some other EU countries higher still. In other words, this is the tax system billionnaires salivate about: it's a regressive tax, specifically designed to make the ultra rich richer, and push everyone else's wealth down hard, even people outside of Ireland)
PLUS the income tax lost for both other EU countries and employees, because for most FANG employees, this is also a tax increase (assuming they chose to move to Ireland rather than stay in the Netherlands or elsewhere in the EU)
I mean we should unite against this! This system is making literally everyone in the EU poorer compared to the US tech sector. From an unemployed Romanian in a long term care facility to a French billionnaire. All are losing money through this system.
I don't think any of the nations you mentioned have ever adjusted their tax policies in order to benefit Ireland. So why should Ireland, a historically poor nation that has been exploited by European powers for centuries, be concerned with the taxes that other governments collect?
So they should take away other people's money because they can, because of stuff that happened a long time ago, and when they feel like they should be able to just take stuff from other people for some random long ago reason ?
I'm so exited finding someone like you! I'm much like Ireland. I was born desperately poor. My parents gave me second hand presents on , if that. I couldn't pay for my school things back then. I got "support" of child services until I, quite literally, threw them out (down a staircase to be exact), and then decided to study and fix things myself. I'm decently rich now, but not rich enough. Given that you support people just stealing because of not-valid past grievances ... Where do you live and where do you hide the cash?
> So they should take away other people's money because they can
Ireland isn't stealing from other people by changing their tax policies to attract business, that isn't theft by any stretch of the imagination outside of a libertarian one that posits all taxation is theft.. and you haven't answered my question: Why should Ireland change their tax policy to benefit other (much larger) governments?
> Nobody hosts datacenters in Ireland because of capacity reasons. It's not a good location for power, people or connectivity.
It is, ah, probably about the best location if you want connectivity to both the US and continental Europe (and also, oddly, Japan, via an arctic cable). A big fraction of total transatlantic connectivity goes through Ireland, and there's substantial redundancy.
However, realistically, today datacenters are mostly built in Ireland because there are already datacenters in Ireland. There are no significant tax benefits to building them in Ireland vs most other countries, but, say, eu-west-1 is the biggest European AWS region, so why, as an Amazon customer, wouldn't you use it? (This is also a thing with us-east-1, which I think is still their biggest region despite their attempts to nudge people away from it to east-2...)
Expansion by _existing_ datacenter operators, who came in ages ago when the connectivity advantage was more of a big deal, seems to be the major driver.
The last point is ... strange. Landfills / Datacenters analogy is far fetched and you do want *local* data if you want The Internet. You know, local regions / availability zones? Maximum availability? Cut undersea cables? Even for distributed Mastodon messaging ... LOL
Dude thats highly unlikely to be LLM training. If anything its cloud. And its cloud because Ireland has been deliberately making itself an attractive place for large businesses to invest.
>In 2016–17, foreign firms paid 80% of Irish corporate tax, employed 25% of the Irish labour force (paid 50% of Irish salary tax), and created 57% of Irish OECD non-farm value-add.
Other people have spilled enough words here that it should be obvious if you read other comments on this thread that Ireland has ridiculously tiny energy grid. The other part of the picture is that the deliberately court foreign multinationals.
Suddenly sitting bolt upright in your chair and screaming "LLMS!!!!!" makes no sense at all.
I lived in Ontario for 18 years and found power to be quite expensive compared to the midwestern US state I lived in before and after.
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.
Quebec has a larger grid and lower rates due to its abundant hydroelectricity.
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 still plenty jealous.
Energy prices are cheaper in Canada as a whole than the US which is cheaper than Europe. While China it's still significantly cheaper that those since they invested in every sort of energy instead of fighting it.
FB just put shovels in the ground on a datacenter in Alberta. Bringing a new nat gas plant online nearby but it's a little quicker to bring the DC on than the plant.
My electricity costs 34 cent per Kw/h and I can’t afford solar panels or a renovation to air to water heating while the government insists we shouldn’t use oil / coal anymore nor logs or turf to heat our homes
I'm in the PNW and I pay 11c/kWh (well, I would, if I didn't have solar). Seattle is 13c, King County averages 16c. Where are you paying 5c/kWh? That's exceptionally cheap.
Honestly my biggest draw is charging my car, so I scheduled that. I do have a 3kWh LFP battery I have as an emergency supply, and since it's in my office anyway I charge my laptop off it, and schedule the wall plug it's on. I scheduled the AC to move the house temp up or down at night. On especially hot or cold days I'm sure I'll use it more at other times. :)
Doesn’t picking the variable rate plan mean your day time costs are priced higher? It does where I am. It’s 10c/kWh on the regular plan but on variable it’s 14c during the day and 7c off hours.
So you're paying a marginally higher rate almost all day on variable-rate, but substantially higher 5-9pm. The math pencils if you have a home battery you can use to load-shift, or perhaps drive an EV a lot.
Correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't PG&E charge one rate for the first ?? kwh and then more for the rest? Perhaps OP made a mistake of using the base rate (which you will blow past if you have too many computers or AC)
They do and how they do the price tranches has changed a lot in the last 5 years. It used to be 4 tranches, 10, 20, 30 and 40. It was very hard to get into the 20 tranch for a single home (maybe if you were bitcoin mining or something). Now the tranches are multiple times higher and its easier to get into the higher tranches. Look on PG&E's website for the specifics.
What kind of question is that? Without knowing anything about the person's geography or local cost of solar, how can you make such a bold assessment of affordability? I live in New Zealand where the capital cost of solar is very expensive and the climate is OK-not-great for solar generation. Even at 30c/kwh the payback (without batteries) is still 15 to 20 years. Not an obvious choice, especially as the capital cost is still declining.
It's crazy that people have to eat the long payback time to switch to renewable, while these wildly profitable (maybe?) data centers can just drink excessively from the grid or switch on natural gas turbines, and skip the lead times/upfront costs.
If they're so productive, make them eat the cost and lead time so we can all have a cheap, functional electricity grid. It would be so easy to mandate no new data centres unless they can procure their own renewable sources of electricity.
For people outside of Ireland: these rates are not the norm. They are usually around 20-22. Can go down 17 if on special plans, or even 12 if you have an electric car.
Ah the old "country's worth of electricity" comparison... Keep in mind that Ireland's entire electricity needs could be covered by a one nuclear power plant (3.8 GW with 4 reactors). IOW, you could offload all Irish datacenters by connecting them to a single nuclear power reactor (~900 MW), a small building that has a footprint of under 50 x 50 meters for the reactor, and another of 100 x 50 meters for the generator.
This article could have been a stacked bar chart with a caption. Maybe even should have been.
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? Efficient in their energy use otherwise? Maybe all of these?
I also find the tone interesting. It's as if there was a threshold being approached, or if the rate was accelerating. But it's 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 slowed to a half? I could easily imagine a similar article celebrating.
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.
Ireland consumes roughly 40 TWh per year, that’s less than the production of four EPR reactors or two times Hinkley Point C.
The country could easily solve its electricity problems with nuclear power. They can ask South Korea for help who built four reactors in UAE with 12 years which now provide 25% of the country’s electricity.
Nuclear power is a non-starter in IReland because the Sellafield nuclear plant in the UK emitted pollution of various for years but UK officials covered it up. The actual severity of the pollution is open to debate but the loss of trusthad a generational impact.
- To fix this two planks you take a hammer and a nail ... - NO! My uncle hit himself with a hammer real hard last year. It is "is a non-starter". Can we use glue? - Yes, it will be more expensive, less efficient ... - NO! My niece inhaled glue last year. It is "is a non-starter". Can we ... <Light goes out. Conversation continues in a darkness>
I know this is supposed to be a joke, but you are making a category error if you conflate hitting your thumb with a hammer with running a nuclear power plant.
One of the problems with nuclear is that, for practical and security reasons, you are dependent on an authoritarian regime to run the plant -- a plant that will be inherently not-transparent for the same reasons.
That means you have to trust the authorities in question to tell you the truth about risks like accidental discharges of radioactive waste. In the case of Ireland, which has a long history of being disenfranchised, the trust is understandably broken.
This makes building a new nuclear plant and having it run in your country by the same powers that screwed you over before with the same technology a non-starter.
It seems you didn't read the Sellafield article. If you want to be intellectually honest, I'd suggest starting there. (or at least with the "Incidents" section)
And if anyone is wrong, they will only have to deal with it for 20-50 years, then they die and the next 5000 administrations have to deal with the literal fallout.
If your uncle hitting his thumb meant everyone in his line and all of his neighbors would have a flat thumb for the next million years then the government would absolutely involve itself in hammer design and operational safety guidelines.
Fallout came from Chernobyl and Fat Boy. There is no fallout from a reactor that doesn't explode, and Chernobyl exploded for human reasons rather than structural ones.
Exhibit 1: Why West will lose on AI – they will run out of power. LOL.
Thanks to commenters. (teachrdan and hinkley)
Yes, I know the reasoning. I am one of those who is against nuclear power stations, Chernobyl and Fukushima are too vivid.
But. If we don't "re-industrialise" the West, we die in a cold and darkness. Literally. We already killed marine ecosystem in Black and Caspian seas. Moving as planned in Gulf. With amount of oil tankers just burning out in the open the "carbon emission" goals seem like a joke. And still – we keep crippling our industry with all this ... I am tempted to say "nonsense", but it's not. It's actually right thing to do but we "outmaneuvered" ourselves out of right things. Now we have to deal with survival – economy first, people later.
> With amount of oil tankers just burning out in the open the "carbon emission" goals seem like a joke
If you refer to the burning Russian tankers in the Azov, that should reduce emissions. The carried oil would've been used internally in Russia, so it's better to just burn it before it gets used, the same emissions would've been there anyway. And burning the tankers and refineries restricts Russian oil production, which is is a win both for the environment and mankind alike.
The electricity from France wouldn’t have radiation, their issue with the electricity from nuclear would be related to having the reactor at close distance.
Isn't this a similar issue of doctors raised by taxpayers money doing hair transplant and cosmetic surgeries instead of working in much less profitable hospitals with sick people or European scientists and engineers risen by public education working in American tech companies or super rich people from all over the world buying all the homes in London which is valuable not because of its resources but because of the people there and now causing housing problems?
They all have the same issues:
1) Pricing that doesn't account for externalities.
2) Those who bear the consequences are not those who reap the benefits
What kind of plastic surgery are you looking to gatekeep?
Because I guarantee you the people who pointed out that plastic surgery was covered have ideas of what that should be.
Plastic surgery can include burn and emergency surgical scars (trauma surgeons are just trying to keep your insides in and your outsides out, and then they have to run to the next patient to do the same), and hair transplants can include head injuries or cancer surgeries in young people in addition to vain old men.
When we discuss things like this in political arenas, nuance goes out the window and you're contributing to condemning little girls to walk around with giant patches of missing hair and people to tolerate visible scars that will absolutely be used to illegally discriminate against them for jobs that would allow them to afford their own procedures.
The common thread in your examples is the idea of entitlements.
Either entitlement to the doctors/engineers labor or a house one doesnt own.
I dont think externalities is the most useful model for thinking about this because it is easy to construct a more favorable hypothetical. That doesnt mean one is entiteled to it.
In certain Asian countries, medical education is 100% covered but you must work at a public hospital for X years. I honestly think it’s very fair. If tax payers full funds your education, it should be mandatory to work in public services for X amount of years.
This is common for teachers in many US states too -- spend X years teaching where we need you the most and we cover your degree.
In the US a teaching degree might be $50,000, and medical degree might be $500,000. I'm not sure I want my state government covering half a million in education costs for one person... I know that we need doctors but I'd want to see some ROI numbers to justify such a high expense.
The National Health Service Corps (NHSC) Scholarship Program and Indian Health Service Scholarship Program will pay for medical school in exchange for agreeing to work in underserved areas for several years. Some states have similar programs. I'm not sure how you would even begin to calculate ROI for that.
It's complex and imperfect, but in this situation the most direct ROI would be the cost of recruiting a newly graduated doctor by increasing the salary until someone accepts compared to the cost of providing the scholarship.
There was an article posted on HN recently about the asymmetry in cost of providing an ambulance service vs the cost of the per-ride service. The cost of a medical degree, and the training on top of the degrees, may seem waaay too high but I am sure that when you need the service you want it to be there. I think if I break a leg, need an emergency surgery, etc I will be okay with $0.00001 of my taxes going into the pile needed for paying off those $500k loans.
At least in the US, the dudes who pick you up in the ambulance do not have medical degrees. They have various certifications that are far less than med-school levels of debt.
I think part of this is the organization of the training. Cuba trains doctors for likely much less than $500k USD. Also, the training we give to a US solider is very expensive but we have "productionized" the process. The people who provide the training are employed by the military, the training is standardized, etc. Maybe a similar approach could work for other skills. Remember, our military trains surgical assistants and nuclear engineers! These are expensive degrees but they manage to do it.
One of the teachers I know had to pay for 7 years past their forgiveness date of 10 years teaching because of the student loan shenanagains in the early 202's and then the shutdowns. Luckily finally she got the loan closed ans is still waiting on the 10% back for paying over.
There are programs that work this way in the US too. Most doctors arent interested because the pay cut you take working for the poor hospitals/military for a decade arent worth the paid off loan.
Water and power are priced by third parties, if they aren't passing some cost on to datacenters thats not the fault of datacenters.
>Those who bear the consequences are not those who reap the benefits
Super broad statement that cannot be meaningfully tested. Your power goes up, but your ISP has more and better peers, your emergency services have redundant vxc's between redundant sites, your steam games are cached more locally, your data is hosted in country rather than overseas and hundreds of other little benefits. A lot of which would cause greater whinging if they suddenly evaporated.
It’s not important who’s fault it is, it’s probably the politicians who were looking for short term gain that they can present as creating jobs or maybe even taking bribes to issue permits. It’s not that important who’s personally to blame.
Politicians wouldnt make more or less jobs by pricing power correctly.
If there was suddenly a bunch of people angry at plumbing because pipes had become expensive, and I found myself having to defend the dual benefits of fresh water and sewerage removal, I would likewise try and identify the root cause of pipes being expensive before crazed internet commentators tried to rip up important infrastructure.
And got electricity price hike last year, and now few weeks ago again, from ~25c kwh, to around 35c kwh! They say its reliance on fossil fuels.
Not just that, think Ireland has one of the most expensive broadbands in the EU!
depends on where you are. In some parts of California you are out $10-20k just for the permitting and panel upgrade.
Then there are proposals to charge homeowners based on insalled capacity. Part of NEM 3.0 in California was a $8/month per KW, but it was defeated. Who is to say it wont be back in 4.0? that would be about a $1000/yr fee for a 10 kw home system.
Just to be contrarian: what we're talking about is "electricity use from economic activity". This should be good for Ireland but they'll need to build energy capacity to keep up.
It's misplaced to be angry about datacenters themselves. There IS value being created, or people wouldn't use the tools.
Construction creates jobs, manufacturing the machines in the buildings is a huge global industry; the value people gain in their work and play is considered worthwhile by them individually.
In the aggregate it all happens in a boring building shaped like a box, mostly built out of the way for economic reasons, and which if well engineered can be pretty efficient for what it does for the human race.
> There IS value being created, or people wouldn't use the tools.
While I do think there is value being created, I think this form of argument is not as watertight as it appears at first glance. Humans are very capable of behaving irrationally.
I think there is a lot of harmful, negative “work” being done by AI today. Creating fake videos for Facebook, running girlfriend bots, automated scams, etc. Even employees just trying to be at the top of their employers’ AI token leaderboards. (So last month, I know). There is legitimate value being created, but I don’t think it’s obvious that the positive value is swamping the negative value 10:1.
“There is value being created, or people wouldn’t buy the meth” - people do buy meth, quite enthusiastically, but any sane person would think allocating 23% of a nation’s electricity to a meth factory is a bad plan.
No doubt, there's always some bad with the good. The counter is to ask about the proportions.
It's actually a sliding scale of badness, but for the sake of argument let's pop a marker on that imaginary badness line and call everything worse than our marker "bad" and everything better than it "good". Let's also assume such objective criteria exist. This is a lot of assumptions!
Now, assuming we got this far, is the "bad" 1% of the sum? Or 90%? 99%? Because we just don't know, I'm going to make another assumption and assume it's a tiny minority.
We still sell knives even though they can stab. Mostly though, knives do other knife things. And we have police and courts to deal with the bad uses.
Anyone with half a brain can see that destroying the public internet is a very very bad thing. I now have to half assume you are a bad faith argument by a bot.
The good information is again being siloed to hide it from the scrapers, destroying a massive amount of value.
Poisoning the well of human trust is one of the worst things you can do to society.
There's also a whole industry of basically "virtual onlyfans" models that generate a TON of content and ad impressions on everything from Instagram, X, TikTok, even Twitch.tv
>How would you react if you got a panicked call from your spouse and it came from their phone number?
I would be surprised if an AI successfully imitated the batshit insane way my wife and I speak to one another, but I get how that could work for, say, a grandparent or aunty.
>There's also a whole industry of basically "virtual onlyfans" models that generate a TON of content and ad impressions on everything from Instagram, X, TikTok, even Twitch.tv
Are there stats on this? Like if you look at the top hundred influencers on these platforms, how many of them are AI? Is it a long tail?
Like you do hear a lot of stories about this kind of thing happening, but I haven't ever seen a figure that says something like "$x million lost to AI scams" the way you do with romance scams or crypto.
Theres no reason for AI hate to bleed over to Data Center hate.
I really cant be stuffed defending AI. It either succeeds or it doesnt. But we get so much value from Data Centers and there's basically no one lauding them as an industry. Its like people waking up one morning and hating trains.
Its like people just discovered they existed yesterday and hate them for no reason.
That doesn't mean we would benefit from expanding those industries by triple-digit percents just to increase the profits of multibillion-dollar corporations without some pretty strong justifications.
In this case, "data centers" don't benefit anyone in and of themselves. They are merely a container for, well, data. And compute. So the degree to which they benefit us depends entirely on what data is stored there or what is being computed there.
Thus, trying to separate "AI hate" from data centers is not merely unhelpful, it's effectively meaningless. The datacenters are the AI that happens within them. That's literally the only reason so many more are being built now.
>That doesn't mean we would benefit from expanding those industries by triple-digit percents just to increase the profits of multibillion-dollar corporations without some pretty strong justifications.
Ok but people are crowing against existing data centers.
>In this case, "data centers" don't benefit anyone in and of themselves
Yeah they do.
>They are merely a container for, well, data. And compute.
No they are also neutral hosts of telecommunications infrastructure where carriers can meet.
This is like saying that you like emergency services calls but want to blow up the wires that carry them.
>The datacenters are the AI that happens within them.
Patently ridiculous.
>That's literally the only reason so many more are being built now.
No you really just started paying attention.
Also "So Many" whats the correct number of Datacenters to be built? How are you calculating that? What happens if AI instead cannibalises existing rack space instead of expanding? What happens to industries that rely on colo when these trillion dollar companies make better offers for their rackspace? Do they just go nowhere? This is like attacking houses because you don't like a subset of tenants.
Of course value is created, the problem is that the value is not created for the people who endure the issues and the pricing is apparently wrong. It is similar to building a SPAM factory somewhere people live on pork, paying higher prices for the pigs and buy all the pigs but not enough for the people who sold you the pigs to use the proceeds to increase the number of pigs or replace them with some other source and as a result you just created a famine.
Maybe they should have been smarter but you operate with more information, you can pay brokers to convince the villagers to sell all their pigs and now the villagers starve, they will find someone who promises to make things right and they will burn your SPAM factory.
So we should allocate electricity to less productive uses to benefit people the most?
People should just keep driving inefficient cars rather than having gas prices increase so they can evaluate whether getting a more efficient car makes sense for them.
Not exactly the spam example, but Ireland remained a net exporter of food during the potato famine. The good farmland went to cattle and things like that for export.
> There IS value being created, or people wouldn't use the tools.
But for who and where is it realized? Ireland’s massive data centers aren’t there to serve Ireland’s tiny population. The value is exported overseas and profits realized overseas.
So what really matters for Ireland (and any country/region hosting these data centers) is whether the benefits in terms of capital spending + the few ongoing jobs created outweighs any increased electricity and environmental costs faced by everyone else.
They get paid a rounding-error amount, and only during the brief construction and setup phase, compared to the total amount of money the thing is making for its owners.
> So what really matters for Ireland (and any country/region hosting these data centers) is whether the benefits in terms of capital spending + the few ongoing jobs created outweighs any increased electricity and environmental costs faced by everyone else
Exactly, which is WHY IDA Ireland and Enterprise Ireland have been a data center first policy in Ireland since the mid-2000s.
Heck, the only reason Microsoft and Google ended up in Dublin was because the IDA clubbed employment creation with data center construction in the 2000s.
Ireland in the 1990s and 2000s was roughly comparable to Greece developmentally back then and also suffered a Greek style economic meltdown from 2008-13. The only reason Ireland didn't stagnate like Greece was because of how business and tech FDI friendly Ireland was.
I think that you might have some details wrong here.
Like, Ireland supplied basically all of the English docs for windows 95, and Apple have been in cork since the 80s.
More generally, the reason tech companies came to Ireland since the 2000s was for tax purposes, which ironically enough lead to us getting bucket loads of corporate tax after the OECD reforms.
And no, Ireland in the 2000s was not developmentally the same as Greece, you may be thinking of the 80s and 90s.
But yeah, the only reason we don't look as indebted as Greece is due to our ludicrous GDP figures.
> Ireland supplied basically all of the English docs for windows 95,
Yep, but the bulk of R&D FDI and the expansion of Ireland's tech scene only arose after Google opened it's campus in Dublin, which itself was in large part to help coordinate Google's data center expansion - especially after acquiring Colt.
> More generally, the reason tech companies came to Ireland since the 2000s was for tax purposes
Not really from personal experience - the tax incentives were nice, but Netherlands also provided a similar tax regime to Ireland during that time period.
It was the data center buildout and incentives by IDA and Enterprise Ireland that were the foundation of Ireland becoming the "Silicon Republic".
Google wouldn't have expanded without the Colt acquisition. Microsoft wouldn't have expanded it's footprint in Ireland without the Data Electronics partnership. Amazon, Vodafone, EMC, Yahoo, and other early 2000s tech companies that helped seed much of the tech industry in Ireland today.
> And no, Ireland in the 2000s was not developmentally the same as Greece
At least with regards to HDI and other developmental indicators, Ireland and Greece both overlapped well into the 2000s. The divergence between the two only kicked in after 2008.
> Apple have been in cork since the 80s...
And was limited to assembly before shifting that to China in the 2000s.
------
Ireland becoming what it is today was not a given in the 2000s - the IDA and Enterprise Ireland pushed boulders to seed the data center ecosystem which helped build the DevOps and Infra ecosystem which then helped seed the domestic ecosystem that exists today.
All the major foreign players in Ireland's tech scene had the option to open in the UK, Netherlands, and Germany as well, but it was the IDA's hard work and foresight in recognizing that data centers and DevOps would allow Ireland to leverage the cloud hyperscaler boom and climb the value chain which allowed Ireland to reach the point it is at today.
Honestly kind of yes. The world is burning, and we can't keep growing like this. Tech optimism made some sense 20 years ago but a lot of us who have been here in that time are feeling pretty jaded.
Well, speaking as an Irish citizen, the actual problem here is that we haven't built as much wind and solar as we were expecting to when many of those data centers were being developed.
If you don’t want your landscape vandalised with windmills and powerlines, go nuclear. Especially where the weather is consistently miserable, not conducive to solar power.
Data centers pay sub-market rates for electricity (as well as getting tax relief, generally). Generally, they use so much electricity that more infrastructure needs to be built. Who pays for that? Not the data center. The utility's capex is spread across all customers (sometimes minus the data center).
Then the utility needs to generate moer power or buy it from elsewhere. That's typically at a higher rate than it's currently getting, which raises the average cost of electricity for everyone. But again, the data center is getting a discounted rate so you have a water bed effect raising everyone's prices there too.
And for what? Maybe a few dozens jobs. The "value" being created is for multinational corporations who likely won't pay anything in taxes for it.
Data centers should be taxed for the land value they allegedly create. We have precedents for this sort of thing, most notably imputed rent. So if you spend $300 million on a building that lasts 30 years, that's worth $10M/year+. Then there's all the compute hardware. Assume $700M amortized over 7 years. Well, the imputed rent is at least $110M/year in base costs, so likely $150M+/year.
All this adds up to it should have to pay tens of millions (and maybe as much as $100M/year) in taxes.
Some of the assumption seems valid such as additional infrastructure cost. But I wonder if that is much of anything. I would assume the DC actually paying for the connection. If that is the case additional capex is not spread across consumer.
The other question is that DC provides a decent baseline for electricity usage. Generally speaking that is a good thing. So it is not an additional burden as implied here.
Third being DC is still paying for the electricity. It is not getting subsidised pricing. They may be getting discount wholesale price due to its volume. But it is not like they are selling at a loss while the rest are covered by consumers.
Generally speaking I don't understand why everyone is suddenly against DC. It may be an issue if power generation hasn't been able to keep up. But in most cases so far that is not what is happening here.
Contrarian to the article or to other HN commenters
This article reports on facts, i.e., the CSO data primarily. It also mentions the existence of controversy
It is not taking a position for or against anything
What does it mean to be "contrarian" with respect to an article like this one
To me, this weird defensive behaviour, i.e., absurd attempts to "argue in favour of data centers", is what raises a red flag
The reporting of facts on energy and water use, i.e., data, triggers this behaviour from HN commenters, as opposed to being triggered by the people who are protesting or campaigning against data centers. This article and many others like it have no hint of "anger" whatsoever. The authors are not taking sides in any debate
Then we have companies actively trying to conceal data about data centers. This sort of behaviour is, IMHO, a red flag
If data centers "have value" and are needed despite their impacts, and the proof of this is that "people are using AI" then what's the problem
Why respond to articles that simply report usage statistics (cf. responding to angry protesters or legislation aimed at regulating data center construction)
The article is not taking a position for or against the construction and operation of data centers
And that's grand, but when these things contest for the same resources I use (electricity, natural gas, water, rolling countryside unblemished by pylons), and I already see my bills soaring from a pair of absolutely unnecessary wars, I worry.
The grid is only looking after its capacity. When Grange Castle announced they're adding nearly 200MW of generation (for a nearly 1GW site) planners whoop with joy but that's 200GW of gas turbine for when they've spiked the wholesale price of electricity. It's not grid-surplus storage.
That sort of economic activity drives inflation. Well before you consider maybe-effects like job reduction.
The very first country in EU who will make electricity dirt-cheap will win the "Sovereign EU AI Tech" war. That includes produce cheap electricity, cutting the redtape and curbing the Unions mafia. So .. not happening. Back to the US ...
How do the data center people protect their expensive data center from colossal rate hikes? They can’t just pick up and move.
So has Ireland made an agreement with them in some way?
I’m just imagining that if there’s no local value for three beyond some temp construction jobs and a handful of service jobs, surely they can just bilk them until they leave. So I imagine data center companies only locate where they can get very safe terms?
I assume that they sign up to long term contracts to secure the price of power.
When it comes to renewal, the DC operator obviously has a sunk cost that they don't want to walk away from. But the electricity generators are also in the same boat. If the DC shuts up shop then there's x00 MW that the generator won't be able to sell and could suppress prices across the whole country. So both parties are incentivised to come to an agreement.
Do they pay for it, and the consequent infrastructure cost increases? If they pay full commercial rates or adjusted rates for behaviours which are net beneficial to the supply process, then isn't this just another form of revenue?
If they have successfully avoided what they consider "externalities" thats a different matter. Like, polluting.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 52.7 ms ] thread(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 2006 when the IDA specifically began wooing tech FDI.
Also, if Europeans actually wish to have a sovereign tech industry, they need compute capacity.
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.
It shouldn't surprise you to know that there are people who disagree with everything you're saying. Do you really believe they're all "objectively wrong"? That's the territory of religion - "only my beliefs are the real ones".
“Excessive: exceeding what is usual, proper, necessary, or normal”
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/excessive
The power use of data centres is objectively exceeding what is usual or normal. Therefore it is objectively excessive.
For data centers, none of those adjectives are being exceeded, so it's not excessive. Ireland is not using more power to run its data centers than anywhere else is, for data centers of a similar size.
To justify the claim of "excessive", you need to define some standard against which that's being measured. That choice of standard is necessarily subjective.
Again, this attempt to reframe subjective claims as objective is an act of either ignorance (not understanding what "objective" means) or zealotry (believing your opinions are the only ones that can be correct, and therefore "objective".) Either way, you need to examine what you're claiming more closely.
You’ve decided that those don’t matter and you’ve created some other metrics by which you could consider the power use typical.
But just because you’ve found a way to say that they’re typical in one way, that doesn’t mean they’re not excessive in another way. They do use power to excess in some ways, therefore it’s perfectly legitimate to describe them as excessive in that way.
Data centres’ power use is becoming a problem for multiple reasons. The problem isn’t going to be solved by denying that a problem exists, or by taking offense when an adjective is used that draws attention to said problem.
> zealotry (believing your opinions are the only ones that can be correct)
Indeed.
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 accounts for almost 3 years and accumulated 66K karma until I and a couple others complained about it.
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 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 they cool the exterior condensers with an open cooling loop.
Which draws from the watermain, is sprayed on the condensers, and is evaporated. This is done to reduce their electric bills.
You are spreading disinformation, while also accusing people who are factually accurate of being foreign propaganda mouthpieces. This isn't a great look.
A fully closed loop data center is the exception, not the rule.
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.
The dirty water bit is the most ridiculous thing. It's meant to paint the picture that the data centers themselves are using the water and dirtying it, when in reality the cause is the development of the actual buildings and infrastructure, which would happen with any industrial development!
All the arguments I see against data centers are arguments against industrialization. There are also arguments against capitalism and wealth inequality, that I sympathise with.
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.
“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, May 10, 1883, quote appears on The New York Times bronze plaque
--Steve Jobs
I think the same goes for newspapers. They are businesses that make money from giving people what they want, and like all businesses they eventually care primarily about making money. Whatever else they were founded to care about is secondary at best.
That's objectively described by "guzzle".
The data scientists aren’t the ones working in the data centres. There’s no real advantage to having the data they’re working on next door unless it’s extremely lag sensitive.
Local proximity of a datacentre is good for fintech, Netflix and gaming servers.
[0] - https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/hyperscalers/microsoft-p...
I'm sure they work up a sweat but probably not on the same order of magnitude
Or about 11,000 GWh which is about 4% of California which means without the theatrics:
California has 4x more data centers than Ireland.
California: ~810 watts per person. (278,000 GWh / 39.4 million people)
Ireland: ~690 watts per person. (32,000 GWh / 5.3 million people)
We have air conditioning and that may be why we use more POWAH
The angry townspeople ought to be curious how it all works before they grab the pitchforks and torches (to post on Instagram and TikTok).
https://mastodon.ie/@handi/116900076149521593
what is the alternative? I don't think self hosting is a robust/defensible option for a majority of internet services
I predict it will last all of two days.
You see the mentally ill chaos unfold within hours when DNS goes down. Imagine taking their datacenter-dependent toys away for more than a day.
How will they muster job interviews (in between datacenter protests) without relying on ChatGPT to feed them answers?
Sounds like a circular dependency to me.
I'm not arguing we should but we don't actually need all of this convenience. We'd adapt almost immediately.
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.
> it is estimated that in 2024, of the order of ~€104bn in annual GVA, 876,000 jobs and €14.6bn in annual employment related tax was enabled by the availability of digital infrastructure provided by data centres located in Ireland.
Seems like the economics of hosting these data centers benefits Ireland substantially, even with their tax breaks.
(technically: FANG taxes in Ireland, in violation of OECD treaties, is 12.5%, and for other very large companies 15%. If your company is not at least a certain size, and you haven't transferred "company IP" into Ireland during a certain window that's now closed, other taxes that don't increase with revenue will raise effective tax to as high as 55% for sole traders. And the actual FANG income is mostly generated in France and Germany, who have 25% and 30% company tax rates respectively, with some other EU countries higher still. In other words, this is the tax system billionnaires salivate about: it's a regressive tax, specifically designed to make the ultra rich richer, and push everyone else's wealth down hard, even people outside of Ireland)
PLUS the income tax lost for both other EU countries and employees, because for most FANG employees, this is also a tax increase (assuming they chose to move to Ireland rather than stay in the Netherlands or elsewhere in the EU)
I mean we should unite against this! This system is making literally everyone in the EU poorer compared to the US tech sector. From an unemployed Romanian in a long term care facility to a French billionnaire. All are losing money through this system.
I'm so exited finding someone like you! I'm much like Ireland. I was born desperately poor. My parents gave me second hand presents on , if that. I couldn't pay for my school things back then. I got "support" of child services until I, quite literally, threw them out (down a staircase to be exact), and then decided to study and fix things myself. I'm decently rich now, but not rich enough. Given that you support people just stealing because of not-valid past grievances ... Where do you live and where do you hide the cash?
Ireland isn't stealing from other people by changing their tax policies to attract business, that isn't theft by any stretch of the imagination outside of a libertarian one that posits all taxation is theft.. and you haven't answered my question: Why should Ireland change their tax policy to benefit other (much larger) governments?
It is, ah, probably about the best location if you want connectivity to both the US and continental Europe (and also, oddly, Japan, via an arctic cable). A big fraction of total transatlantic connectivity goes through Ireland, and there's substantial redundancy.
However, realistically, today datacenters are mostly built in Ireland because there are already datacenters in Ireland. There are no significant tax benefits to building them in Ireland vs most other countries, but, say, eu-west-1 is the biggest European AWS region, so why, as an Amazon customer, wouldn't you use it? (This is also a thing with us-east-1, which I think is still their biggest region despite their attempts to nudge people away from it to east-2...)
Expansion by _existing_ datacenter operators, who came in ages ago when the connectivity advantage was more of a big deal, seems to be the major driver.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/business/china-russia-ai-...
Dude thats highly unlikely to be LLM training. If anything its cloud. And its cloud because Ireland has been deliberately making itself an attractive place for large businesses to invest.
>In 2016–17, foreign firms paid 80% of Irish corporate tax, employed 25% of the Irish labour force (paid 50% of Irish salary tax), and created 57% of Irish OECD non-farm value-add.
Other people have spilled enough words here that it should be obvious if you read other comments on this thread that Ireland has ridiculously tiny energy grid. The other part of the picture is that the deliberately court foreign multinationals.
Suddenly sitting bolt upright in your chair and screaming "LLMS!!!!!" makes no sense at all.
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 still plenty jealous.
Alberta doesn't have any coal power plants afaik.
[1]: This alone will increase costs by something like 4c/kWh from these 70 year old dams: https://www.king5.com/article/news/investigations/skagit-riv...
https://www.seattle.gov/city-light/residential-services/bill...
And the time periods are: https://www.seattle.gov/images/Departments/CityLight/Residen...
So you're paying a marginally higher rate almost all day on variable-rate, but substantially higher 5-9pm. The math pencils if you have a home battery you can use to load-shift, or perhaps drive an EV a lot.
My power is USD$0.271/kWh and I'm nowhere near Ireland.
If they're so productive, make them eat the cost and lead time so we can all have a cheap, functional electricity grid. It would be so easy to mandate no new data centres unless they can procure their own renewable sources of electricity.
https://www.electricireland.ie/residential/news/detail/elect...
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? Efficient in their energy use otherwise? Maybe all of these?
I also find the tone interesting. It's as if there was a threshold being approached, or if the rate was accelerating. But it's 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 slowed to a half? I could easily imagine a similar article celebrating.
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 country could easily solve its electricity problems with nuclear power. They can ask South Korea for help who built four reactors in UAE with 12 years which now provide 25% of the country’s electricity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield#Incidents
One of the problems with nuclear is that, for practical and security reasons, you are dependent on an authoritarian regime to run the plant -- a plant that will be inherently not-transparent for the same reasons.
That means you have to trust the authorities in question to tell you the truth about risks like accidental discharges of radioactive waste. In the case of Ireland, which has a long history of being disenfranchised, the trust is understandably broken.
This makes building a new nuclear plant and having it run in your country by the same powers that screwed you over before with the same technology a non-starter.
It seems you didn't read the Sellafield article. If you want to be intellectually honest, I'd suggest starting there. (or at least with the "Incidents" section)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield#Incidents
If your uncle hitting his thumb meant everyone in his line and all of his neighbors would have a flat thumb for the next million years then the government would absolutely involve itself in hammer design and operational safety guidelines.
Yes, waste lasts a long time. That's mostly in the form of a pond of slightly clicky water. The fear is overblown. See http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2026/ph241/teixeira2/
Thanks to commenters. (teachrdan and hinkley)
Yes, I know the reasoning. I am one of those who is against nuclear power stations, Chernobyl and Fukushima are too vivid.
But. If we don't "re-industrialise" the West, we die in a cold and darkness. Literally. We already killed marine ecosystem in Black and Caspian seas. Moving as planned in Gulf. With amount of oil tankers just burning out in the open the "carbon emission" goals seem like a joke. And still – we keep crippling our industry with all this ... I am tempted to say "nonsense", but it's not. It's actually right thing to do but we "outmaneuvered" ourselves out of right things. Now we have to deal with survival – economy first, people later.
If you refer to the burning Russian tankers in the Azov, that should reduce emissions. The carried oil would've been used internally in Russia, so it's better to just burn it before it gets used, the same emissions would've been there anyway. And burning the tankers and refineries restricts Russian oil production, which is is a win both for the environment and mankind alike.
They all have the same issues:
1) Pricing that doesn't account for externalities.
2) Those who bear the consequences are not those who reap the benefits
Because I guarantee you the people who pointed out that plastic surgery was covered have ideas of what that should be.
Plastic surgery can include burn and emergency surgical scars (trauma surgeons are just trying to keep your insides in and your outsides out, and then they have to run to the next patient to do the same), and hair transplants can include head injuries or cancer surgeries in young people in addition to vain old men.
When we discuss things like this in political arenas, nuance goes out the window and you're contributing to condemning little girls to walk around with giant patches of missing hair and people to tolerate visible scars that will absolutely be used to illegally discriminate against them for jobs that would allow them to afford their own procedures.
Either entitlement to the doctors/engineers labor or a house one doesnt own.
I dont think externalities is the most useful model for thinking about this because it is easy to construct a more favorable hypothetical. That doesnt mean one is entiteled to it.
In the US a teaching degree might be $50,000, and medical degree might be $500,000. I'm not sure I want my state government covering half a million in education costs for one person... I know that we need doctors but I'd want to see some ROI numbers to justify such a high expense.
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R44970
Water and power are priced by third parties, if they aren't passing some cost on to datacenters thats not the fault of datacenters.
>Those who bear the consequences are not those who reap the benefits
Super broad statement that cannot be meaningfully tested. Your power goes up, but your ISP has more and better peers, your emergency services have redundant vxc's between redundant sites, your steam games are cached more locally, your data is hosted in country rather than overseas and hundreds of other little benefits. A lot of which would cause greater whinging if they suddenly evaporated.
If there was suddenly a bunch of people angry at plumbing because pipes had become expensive, and I found myself having to defend the dual benefits of fresh water and sewerage removal, I would likewise try and identify the root cause of pipes being expensive before crazed internet commentators tried to rip up important infrastructure.
Then there are proposals to charge homeowners based on insalled capacity. Part of NEM 3.0 in California was a $8/month per KW, but it was defeated. Who is to say it wont be back in 4.0? that would be about a $1000/yr fee for a 10 kw home system.
It's misplaced to be angry about datacenters themselves. There IS value being created, or people wouldn't use the tools.
Construction creates jobs, manufacturing the machines in the buildings is a huge global industry; the value people gain in their work and play is considered worthwhile by them individually.
In the aggregate it all happens in a boring building shaped like a box, mostly built out of the way for economic reasons, and which if well engineered can be pretty efficient for what it does for the human race.
While I do think there is value being created, I think this form of argument is not as watertight as it appears at first glance. Humans are very capable of behaving irrationally.
I think there is a lot of harmful, negative “work” being done by AI today. Creating fake videos for Facebook, running girlfriend bots, automated scams, etc. Even employees just trying to be at the top of their employers’ AI token leaderboards. (So last month, I know). There is legitimate value being created, but I don’t think it’s obvious that the positive value is swamping the negative value 10:1.
“There is value being created, or people wouldn’t buy the meth” - people do buy meth, quite enthusiastically, but any sane person would think allocating 23% of a nation’s electricity to a meth factory is a bad plan.
It's actually a sliding scale of badness, but for the sake of argument let's pop a marker on that imaginary badness line and call everything worse than our marker "bad" and everything better than it "good". Let's also assume such objective criteria exist. This is a lot of assumptions!
Now, assuming we got this far, is the "bad" 1% of the sum? Or 90%? 99%? Because we just don't know, I'm going to make another assumption and assume it's a tiny minority.
We still sell knives even though they can stab. Mostly though, knives do other knife things. And we have police and courts to deal with the bad uses.
The good information is again being siloed to hide it from the scrapers, destroying a massive amount of value.
Poisoning the well of human trust is one of the worst things you can do to society.
Which half of your brain did your post come from?
Most people I know use it as a tool to do things for them, technical or otherwise.
Even the loneliest people I know don't want to talk to a clanker unless there's at least a pretense of work being done.
How would you react if you got a panicked call from your spouse and it came from their phone number?
To answer your question, it's a series of different but huge problems.
https://www.iansresearch.com/resources/all-blogs/post/securi...
https://www.rfi.fr/en/international-news/20260603-20-minutes...
https://cbsaustin.com/news/local/deepfake-scams-are-creeping...
There's also a whole industry of basically "virtual onlyfans" models that generate a TON of content and ad impressions on everything from Instagram, X, TikTok, even Twitch.tv
I would be surprised if an AI successfully imitated the batshit insane way my wife and I speak to one another, but I get how that could work for, say, a grandparent or aunty.
>There's also a whole industry of basically "virtual onlyfans" models that generate a TON of content and ad impressions on everything from Instagram, X, TikTok, even Twitch.tv
Are there stats on this? Like if you look at the top hundred influencers on these platforms, how many of them are AI? Is it a long tail?
Like you do hear a lot of stories about this kind of thing happening, but I haven't ever seen a figure that says something like "$x million lost to AI scams" the way you do with romance scams or crypto.
I really cant be stuffed defending AI. It either succeeds or it doesnt. But we get so much value from Data Centers and there's basically no one lauding them as an industry. Its like people waking up one morning and hating trains.
Its like people just discovered they existed yesterday and hate them for no reason.
That doesn't mean we would benefit from expanding those industries by triple-digit percents just to increase the profits of multibillion-dollar corporations without some pretty strong justifications.
In this case, "data centers" don't benefit anyone in and of themselves. They are merely a container for, well, data. And compute. So the degree to which they benefit us depends entirely on what data is stored there or what is being computed there.
Thus, trying to separate "AI hate" from data centers is not merely unhelpful, it's effectively meaningless. The datacenters are the AI that happens within them. That's literally the only reason so many more are being built now.
Ok but people are crowing against existing data centers.
>In this case, "data centers" don't benefit anyone in and of themselves
Yeah they do.
>They are merely a container for, well, data. And compute.
No they are also neutral hosts of telecommunications infrastructure where carriers can meet.
This is like saying that you like emergency services calls but want to blow up the wires that carry them.
>The datacenters are the AI that happens within them.
Patently ridiculous.
>That's literally the only reason so many more are being built now.
No you really just started paying attention.
Also "So Many" whats the correct number of Datacenters to be built? How are you calculating that? What happens if AI instead cannibalises existing rack space instead of expanding? What happens to industries that rely on colo when these trillion dollar companies make better offers for their rackspace? Do they just go nowhere? This is like attacking houses because you don't like a subset of tenants.
Maybe they should have been smarter but you operate with more information, you can pay brokers to convince the villagers to sell all their pigs and now the villagers starve, they will find someone who promises to make things right and they will burn your SPAM factory.
People should just keep driving inefficient cars rather than having gas prices increase so they can evaluate whether getting a more efficient car makes sense for them.
Commensurate with their costs, including externalities? That very much remains to be seen.
But for who and where is it realized? Ireland’s massive data centers aren’t there to serve Ireland’s tiny population. The value is exported overseas and profits realized overseas.
So what really matters for Ireland (and any country/region hosting these data centers) is whether the benefits in terms of capital spending + the few ongoing jobs created outweighs any increased electricity and environmental costs faced by everyone else.
Perhaps construction companies could hire some copyright lobbyists to get a law passed so they're paid 75 years after the creation of the work.
Exactly, which is WHY IDA Ireland and Enterprise Ireland have been a data center first policy in Ireland since the mid-2000s.
Heck, the only reason Microsoft and Google ended up in Dublin was because the IDA clubbed employment creation with data center construction in the 2000s.
Ireland in the 1990s and 2000s was roughly comparable to Greece developmentally back then and also suffered a Greek style economic meltdown from 2008-13. The only reason Ireland didn't stagnate like Greece was because of how business and tech FDI friendly Ireland was.
Like, Ireland supplied basically all of the English docs for windows 95, and Apple have been in cork since the 80s.
More generally, the reason tech companies came to Ireland since the 2000s was for tax purposes, which ironically enough lead to us getting bucket loads of corporate tax after the OECD reforms.
And no, Ireland in the 2000s was not developmentally the same as Greece, you may be thinking of the 80s and 90s.
But yeah, the only reason we don't look as indebted as Greece is due to our ludicrous GDP figures.
Yep, but the bulk of R&D FDI and the expansion of Ireland's tech scene only arose after Google opened it's campus in Dublin, which itself was in large part to help coordinate Google's data center expansion - especially after acquiring Colt.
> More generally, the reason tech companies came to Ireland since the 2000s was for tax purposes
Not really from personal experience - the tax incentives were nice, but Netherlands also provided a similar tax regime to Ireland during that time period.
It was the data center buildout and incentives by IDA and Enterprise Ireland that were the foundation of Ireland becoming the "Silicon Republic".
Google wouldn't have expanded without the Colt acquisition. Microsoft wouldn't have expanded it's footprint in Ireland without the Data Electronics partnership. Amazon, Vodafone, EMC, Yahoo, and other early 2000s tech companies that helped seed much of the tech industry in Ireland today.
> And no, Ireland in the 2000s was not developmentally the same as Greece
At least with regards to HDI and other developmental indicators, Ireland and Greece both overlapped well into the 2000s. The divergence between the two only kicked in after 2008.
> Apple have been in cork since the 80s...
And was limited to assembly before shifting that to China in the 2000s.
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Ireland becoming what it is today was not a given in the 2000s - the IDA and Enterprise Ireland pushed boulders to seed the data center ecosystem which helped build the DevOps and Infra ecosystem which then helped seed the domestic ecosystem that exists today.
All the major foreign players in Ireland's tech scene had the option to open in the UK, Netherlands, and Germany as well, but it was the IDA's hard work and foresight in recognizing that data centers and DevOps would allow Ireland to leverage the cloud hyperscaler boom and climb the value chain which allowed Ireland to reach the point it is at today.
If you don’t want your landscape vandalised with windmills and powerlines, go nuclear. Especially where the weather is consistently miserable, not conducive to solar power.
Data centers pay sub-market rates for electricity (as well as getting tax relief, generally). Generally, they use so much electricity that more infrastructure needs to be built. Who pays for that? Not the data center. The utility's capex is spread across all customers (sometimes minus the data center).
Then the utility needs to generate moer power or buy it from elsewhere. That's typically at a higher rate than it's currently getting, which raises the average cost of electricity for everyone. But again, the data center is getting a discounted rate so you have a water bed effect raising everyone's prices there too.
And for what? Maybe a few dozens jobs. The "value" being created is for multinational corporations who likely won't pay anything in taxes for it.
Data centers should be taxed for the land value they allegedly create. We have precedents for this sort of thing, most notably imputed rent. So if you spend $300 million on a building that lasts 30 years, that's worth $10M/year+. Then there's all the compute hardware. Assume $700M amortized over 7 years. Well, the imputed rent is at least $110M/year in base costs, so likely $150M+/year.
All this adds up to it should have to pay tens of millions (and maybe as much as $100M/year) in taxes.
uh... how? they do pay for what they use.
Don't you ever stop to wonder why?
Some of the assumption seems valid such as additional infrastructure cost. But I wonder if that is much of anything. I would assume the DC actually paying for the connection. If that is the case additional capex is not spread across consumer.
The other question is that DC provides a decent baseline for electricity usage. Generally speaking that is a good thing. So it is not an additional burden as implied here.
Third being DC is still paying for the electricity. It is not getting subsidised pricing. They may be getting discount wholesale price due to its volume. But it is not like they are selling at a loss while the rest are covered by consumers.
Generally speaking I don't understand why everyone is suddenly against DC. It may be an issue if power generation hasn't been able to keep up. But in most cases so far that is not what is happening here.
Contrarian to the article or to other HN commenters
This article reports on facts, i.e., the CSO data primarily. It also mentions the existence of controversy
It is not taking a position for or against anything
What does it mean to be "contrarian" with respect to an article like this one
To me, this weird defensive behaviour, i.e., absurd attempts to "argue in favour of data centers", is what raises a red flag
The reporting of facts on energy and water use, i.e., data, triggers this behaviour from HN commenters, as opposed to being triggered by the people who are protesting or campaigning against data centers. This article and many others like it have no hint of "anger" whatsoever. The authors are not taking sides in any debate
Then we have companies actively trying to conceal data about data centers. This sort of behaviour is, IMHO, a red flag
If data centers "have value" and are needed despite their impacts, and the proof of this is that "people are using AI" then what's the problem
Why respond to articles that simply report usage statistics (cf. responding to angry protesters or legislation aimed at regulating data center construction)
The article is not taking a position for or against the construction and operation of data centers
The grid is only looking after its capacity. When Grange Castle announced they're adding nearly 200MW of generation (for a nearly 1GW site) planners whoop with joy but that's 200GW of gas turbine for when they've spiked the wholesale price of electricity. It's not grid-surplus storage.
That sort of economic activity drives inflation. Well before you consider maybe-effects like job reduction.
So has Ireland made an agreement with them in some way?
I’m just imagining that if there’s no local value for three beyond some temp construction jobs and a handful of service jobs, surely they can just bilk them until they leave. So I imagine data center companies only locate where they can get very safe terms?
When it comes to renewal, the DC operator obviously has a sunk cost that they don't want to walk away from. But the electricity generators are also in the same boat. If the DC shuts up shop then there's x00 MW that the generator won't be able to sell and could suppress prices across the whole country. So both parties are incentivised to come to an agreement.
If they have successfully avoided what they consider "externalities" thats a different matter. Like, polluting.