Ireland embraced data centers that the AI boom needs. Now they're consuming too much of its energy

CLONDALKIN, Ireland (AP) — Dozens of massive data centers humming at the outskirts of Dublin are consuming more electricity than all of the urban homes in Ireland and starting to wear out the warm welcome that brought them here.

Now, a country that made itself a computing factory for Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and TikTok is wondering whether it was all worth it as tech giants look around the world to build even more data centers to fuel the next wave of artificial intelligence.

Fears of rolling blackouts led Ireland's grid operator to halt new data centers near Dublin until 2028. These huge buildings and their powerful computers last year consumed 21% of the nation’s electricity, according to official records. No other country has reported a higher burden to the International Energy Agency.

Not only that, but Ireland is still heavily reliant on burning fossil fuels to generate electricity, despite a growing number of wind farms sprouting across the countryside. Further data center expansion threatens Ireland's goals to sharply cut planet-warming emissions.

Ireland is a “microcosm of what many countries could be facing over the next decade, particularly with the growth of AI,” said energy researcher Paul Deane of University College Cork.

Twenty-six-year-old activist Darragh Adelaide lives in a working-class Dublin suburb just across a busy motorway from Grange Castle Business Park, one of Ireland’s biggest data center clusters. It could get even bigger were Adelaide not a thorn in the side of Google’s expansion plans.

“It’s kind of an outrageous number of data centers,” Adelaide said. “People have started to make the connection between the amount of electricity they’re using and electricity prices going up.”

Ireland has attracted global tech companies since the “Celtic Tiger” boom at the turn of the 21st century. Tax incentives, a highly skilled, English-speaking workforce and the country’s membership in the European Union have all contributed to making the tech sector a central part of the Irish economy. The island is also a node for undersea cables that extend to the U.S., Britain, Iceland and mainland Europe.

Nearly all of the data centers sit on the edge of Dublin, where their proximity to the capital city facilitates online financial transactions and other activities that require fast connections. Data center computers run hot, but compared to other parts of the world, Ireland's cool temperatures make it easier to keep them from overheating without drawing in as much water.

Still, buildings that for years went mostly unnoticed have attracted unwanted attention as their power demands surged while Irish householders pay some of Europe’s highest electricity bills. Ireland’s Environmental Protection Agency has also flagged concerns about nitrogen oxide pollution from data centers’ on-site generators — typically gas or diesel turbines — affecting areas near Dublin.

A crackdown began in 2021, spurred by projections that data centers are on pace to take up one third of Ireland's electricity in this decade. Regulators declared that Dublin had hit its limits and could no longer plug more data centers into its grid. The government urged tech companies to look outside the capital and find ways to supply their own power.

“What’s happening in Ireland is the politics of basically what happens when you build too many of these things,” said University College Dublin researcher Patrick Brodie. “Even though people have recognized for a while that data centers are energy hogs, there hasn’t really been so many of these moments where, effectively, Ireland issued a red alert.”

Adelaide was a child when Microsoft opened Grange Castle's first data center in 2009, but enormous complexes built by Amazon, Google, Microsoft and other companies have since expanded around the ruined castle that anchors the business park. They have their own modern fortifications of high fences, surveillance cameras and guard houses, and don’t display their corporate logos.

In June, Adelaide’s campaign against data centers helped get him elected to a seat on the South Dublin County Council for the leftist People Not Profits Party. The council soon after rejected Google’s plan to build another data center. Google appealed the decision in September.

“It was only going to employ around 50 people,” Adelaide said. “It would have been a massive cost to the local area and to Ireland in general with very little benefit, which is kind of how the tax haven system works.”

The backlash from Dublin-area local planning authorities — combined with stricter, if sometimes contradictory, guidance from the national government — has frustrated data center developers.

One fully-built data center from Texas-based Digital Realty is sitting idle at Grange Castle while it awaits permission to connect to the electricity grid. The company sells space within its data centers for clients such as banks, email providers and social media platforms. It says it lacks a grid connection despite contracting for enough renewable energy to power all of its Irish data centers.

“When we look at artificial intelligence, when we look at new technologies coming along the line, the basic requirement for all of those is power infrastructure,” said Dermot Lahey, who directs Digital Realty's data center implementation in Ireland, speaking inside a cavernous empty data hall. Ireland has all the elements to make it a “great home for AI expansion,” he said.

“What’s preventing us from being able to leverage that is the fact that the power constraints that we have, or the power moratorium that we have, is greatly impacting our ability to provide space for customers,” Lahey said.

Once colder weather sets in, the smoky fragrance of fireplaces burning briquettes of peat lingers over County Offaly, just over an hour’s drive west of Dublin in a region known as the Midlands. It’s places like this where some data center developers, thwarted by Dublin’s constraints, now see opportunity.

A report commissioned by County Offaly’s government pitches the bog-dotted region as a place to “create thousands of green jobs” and rival “Dublin, Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam and Paris in being an anchor for data centres powered by renewable energy.”

Farmer and conservationist Brian Sheridan, 83, is doubtful. He's seen this region transformed once before, from a vast wetland known as the Bog of Allen to barren pockets of brownfields as people cut away trenches of dense peat soil, or turf – first with spades and later with tractors at an industrial scale to create homegrown fuel.

“The bog started disappearing and it wasn't being replaced,” said Sheridan, walking along a boardwalk over carpets of moss and sedges in the now-protected Clara Bog Nature Reserve.

Decades of rapid extraction fostered Ireland's energy independence and employed scores of workers in turf-cutting, briquette factories and power plants. But it also polluted the air and devastated a delicate environment. Bogs that naturally trapped large amounts of carbon dioxide were stripped down to the bedrock, contributing to global warming. When burned, peat is dirtier than coal.

Ireland has largely banned the sale of peat and shuttered the last remaining peat-fired power plants. But the state-supported company at the helm of peat extraction, Bord na Móna, still controls vast tracts of former bogland. It has refashioned itself as a renewable energy provider, laying down wind turbines and solar farms and partnering with Amazon to build a data center near the village of Rhode.

Bord na Móna declined multiple interview requests about its plans, and some residents feel left in the dark.

“Bord na Móna, as far as I’m concerned, are a law unto themselves,” Sheridan said. “Now that the turf-cutting is all finished, they should be gone. But it’s still the same Bord Na Móna and they won’t answer questions.”

Amazon declined to talk about specific projects and has repeatedly signaled it may shift its new data center investments away from Ireland. But an executive said the company is still working closely with the Irish government and characterized Ireland’s challenges as mostly about transmission — building the infrastructure to get new clean energy where it needs to go.

“Ireland has tremendous opportunity for additional renewable energy,” said Kevin Miller, Amazon Web Services’ vice president of global data centers. "However, they also need quite a bit more capacity on the grid to tap into that generation.”

A tech-driven race is on to harness the region's wind. Backed by a power purchase agreement with Microsoft, the Norwegian wind energy company Statkraft is building nine towering wind turbines in remote former boglands along County Offaly’s eastern edge. Statkraft’s managing director for Ireland, Kevin O’Donovan, said data centers are actually helping to accelerate Ireland’s clean energy transition.

“For a lot of the mainland European countries, demand is going down and that’s actually leading to a challenge to roll out renewables,” O’Donovan said. “Whereas in Ireland we have demand that’s increasing because the country is growing economically and obviously a part of that is the data center growth.”

On the other side of Offaly, a group of residents who live along the Lemanaghan Bog near the site of a 7th-century monastery are skeptical of such claims. They are opposed to what a proposed Bord Na Móna wind farm will do to its cultural heritage and ecology.

KK Kenny took his concerns to Dublin this fall in a meeting with the country’s taoiseach, or prime minister, Simon Harris. Kenny wants to see the bog preserved for biodiversity. He'd be happy to see data center developers follow through with their pledge to look to other European countries.

“They say, oh, they’re going to pull out," Kenny said. "That would be a great thing. We can’t sustain them.”

Some neighbors of Amazon's proposed data center in Rhode are more open to the idea. One village resident already commutes all the way to Dublin to work at a data center. Another is hoping it will employ people who’d want to buy new homes.

“We’re all for change,” said Gerard Whelan. “I’ll get work because I build houses. It’s a domino effect.”

At a village pub, the Rhode Inn, Whelan points to a photograph of the old peat-burning power plant where his father worked the control room. Its cooling towers loomed over the village before their demolition two decades ago. Another nearby plant only stopped burning peat a year ago.

What happens next for Ireland's data centers could depend in part on the new national government coming into power early next year.

Data centers were not a top issue for Irish voters who showed up to the polls on Nov. 29. But analysts expect the two center-right parties forming a new coalition government to face industry pressure to ease limits on data center expansion.

Ossian Smyth, an outgoing minister of state for the Irish government whose Green Party lost nearly all its parliamentary seats, said it would be a mistake to slow down Ireland's climate commitments. But he also sees the limits on data center growth set by his outgoing government as having resolved most people's concerns.

What other countries can learn from Ireland's experience, he added, is to carefully manage the effect of data centers on the stability of the electricity system — and make sure their benefits are much more than income or foreign investment.

“Don’t see them as a necessary evil or something that you just have to put up with because it makes money and it gets taxes,” Smyth said.

Bog expert Brian Sheridan walks along a boardwalk in the protected Clara Bog Nature Reserve that data center developers consider a potential growth region, in Clara, Ireland, Wednesday, Oct. 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Bram Janssen)

A local activist opposing the construction of wind farms burns peat in a fireplace, in Lemanaghan, Ireland, Wednesday, Oct. 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Bram Janssen)

Old local newspapers are hanging on a wall inside an activist head quarters, in Lemanaghan, Ireland, Wednesday, Oct. 16, 2024, who oppose to the construction of wind farms. (AP Photo/Bram Janssen)

A cleaner mops the floor in the reception hall of an empty data center building, in Dublin, Ireland, Thursday, Oct. 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Bram Janssen)

Protest banners against wind turbines displayed on a building in Lemanaghan, Ireland, Wednesday, Oct. 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Bram Janssen)

Wind turbines can be seen from the village of Rhode, Ireland, Thursday, Oct. 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Bram Janssen)

An empty data hall inside a data center from Texas-based Digital Realty, in Dublin, Ireland, Thursday, Oct. 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Bram Janssen)

An aerial view of the Meta data center, in Dublin, Ireland, Wednesday, Oct. 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Bram Janssen)

A boardwalk is seen from above in the Clara Bog Nature Preserve, in Clara, Ireland, Wednesday, Oct. 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Bram Janssen)

A worker sits inside the control centre of the Digital Realty data center, in Dublin, Ireland, Thursday, Oct. 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Bram Janssen)

MAMOUDZOU, Mayotte (AP) — France's President Emmanuel Macron traveled Thursday to the Indian Ocean archipelago of Mayotte to survey the devastation that Cyclone Chido wrought across the French territory as thousands of people tried to cope without the bare essentials such as water or electricity.

“Mayotte is demolished,” an airport security agent told Macron as soon as he stepped of the plane.

The security agent, Assane Haloi, said her family members, including small children, are without water or electricity and have nowhere to go, after the strongest cyclone in nearly a century ripped through the French territory of Mayotte off the coast of Africa on Saturday.

“There’s no roof, there’s nothing. No water, no food, no electricity. We can’t even shelter, we are all wet with our children covering ourselves with whatever we have so that we can sleep,” she said, asking for emergency aid.

Macron went on an helicopter for an aerial appraisal of the damage. He then headed to the hospital in Mamoudzou, Mayotte’s capital, to meet with medical staff and patients.

Wearing a traditional Mayotte scarf on his white shirt and tie, sleeves rolled to the elbows, the French president listened to people asking for help. A member of the medical staff told him some people hadn't had a drink of water for 48 hours.

Some residents also expressed their agony at not knowing about those who have died or are still missing, partly because of the Muslim practice of burying the dead within 24 hours.

Mayotte’s lawmaker Estelle Youssoufa said “we’re dealing with open-air mass graves. There are no rescuers, no one has come to recover the buried bodies.”

Some survivors and aid groups have described hasty burials and the stench of bodies.

Macron acknowledged that many who died haven't been reported. He said phone services will be repaired “in the coming days” so that people can report their missing loved ones.

French authorities said at least 31 people have died and more than 1,500 people were injured, more than 200 critically. But it’s feared hundreds or even thousands of people have died.

Macron was later expected to visit a destroyed neighborhood.

Abdou Houmadou, 27, said it's emergency aid that's needed, not Macron's presence. “Mr President, what I'd like to tell you... is I think the spending you made from Paris to Mayotte would have been better spent to help the people," he said.

Another resident, Ahamadi Mohammed, said Macron’s visit “is a good thing because he’ll be able to see by himself the damage.”

“I think that we’ll then get significant aid to try and get the island back on its feet,” the 58-year-old said.

Macron's office said four tons food and medical aid as well as additional rescuers were aboard the president's flight.

A navy ship was due to arrive in Mayotte on Thursday with 180 tons of aid and equipment, according to the French military.

People living in a large slum on the outskirts of Mamoudzou were some of the hardest hit from the cyclone. Many had lost their houses, some had lost friends.

Nassirou Hamidouni sheltered in his house when the cyclone hit.

His neighbor was killed when his house collapsed on him and his six children. Hamidouni and others dug through the rubble to reach them.

The 28-year-old father of five is now trying to rebuild his own house, which was also destroyed.

He believes the death toll is much higher than what’s officially being reported given the severity of what he lived through.

"It was very hard,” he said.

Mayotte, located in the Indian Ocean between mainland Africa’s east coast and northern Madagascar, is France’s poorest territory.

The cyclone devastated entire neighborhoods as many people ignored the warnings, thinking the storm wouldn’t be so extreme.

Mayotte has more than 320,000 people according to the French government.

Most residents are Muslim and French authorities have estimated another 100,000 migrants live there.

Mayotte is the only part of the Comoros archipelago that voted to remain part of France in a 1974 referendum.

The French territory has seen in the past decade a massive arrival of migrants from the neighboring islands — the independent nation of Comoros, one of the world’s poorest countries.

Some other migrants come from as far as Somalia, with, for some, the hope to be able to reach the European continent.

Corbet reported from Paris. Associated Press journalist Masha Macpherson in Paris contributed.

People walk past debris in the Kaweni slum Thursday, Dec. 19, 2024, on the outskirts of Mamoudzou, in the French Indian Ocean island of Mayotte, after Cyclone Chido. (AP Photo/Adrienne Surprenant)

People walk past debris in the Kaweni slum Thursday, Dec. 19, 2024, on the outskirts of Mamoudzou, in the French Indian Ocean island of Mayotte, after Cyclone Chido. (AP Photo/Adrienne Surprenant)

A woman carrying her belongings walks past debris after Cyclone Chido in the Kaweni slum Thursday, Dec. 19, 2024, on the outskirts of Mamoudzou, in the French Indian Ocean island of Mayotte. (AP Photo/Adrienne Surprenant)

Damage is seen in the Kaweni slum Thursday, Dec. 19, 2024, on the outskirts of Mamoudzou, in the French Indian Ocean island of Mayotte, after Cyclone Chido. (AP Photo/Adrienne Surprenant)

People get water from a well in the lower part of the Kaweni slum where they used to have tap water, on the outskirts of Mamoudzou, in the French Indian Ocean island of Mayotte Thursday, Dec. 19, 2024, after Cyclone Chido. (AP Photo/Adrienne Surprenant)

Cleared debris after Cyclone Chido are seen in the Kaweni slum on the outskirts of Mamoudzou, in the French Indian Ocean island of Mayotte, Thursday, Dec. 19, 2024. (AP Photo/Adrienne Surprenant)

A man starts rebuilding his shack in the Kaweni slum on the outskirts of Mamoudzou, in the French Indian Ocean island of Mayotte, Thursday, Dec. 19, 2024, after Cyclone Chido. (AP Photo/Adrienne Surprenant)

People get water from a well in the lower part of the Kaweni slum where they used to have tap water, on the outskirts of Mamoudzou, in the French Indian Ocean island of Mayotte Thursday, Dec. 19, 2024, after Cyclone Chido. (AP Photo/Adrienne Surprenant)

Nassirou Hamidouni, 28, father of five, stands amongst the debris of the neighboring destroyed home in the slum of Kaweni on the outskirts of Mamoudzou, in the French Indian Ocean island of Mayotte Thursday, Dec. 19, 2024, after Cyclone Chido. (AP Photo/Adrienne Surprenant)

Debris litters a stream in the Kaweni slum in the French Indian Ocean island of Mayotte, Thursday, Dec. 19, 2024, after Cyclone Chido.. (AP Photo/Adrienne Surprenant))

People queue for gas in Mamoudzou, in the French Indian Ocean island of Mayotte, Thursday, Dec. 19, 2024, after Cyclone Chido. (AP Photo/Adrienne Surprenant)

People queue for gas in Mamoudzou, in the French Indian Ocean island of Mayotte, Thursday, Dec. 19, 2024, after Cyclone Chido. (AP Photo/Adrienne Surprenant)

Women wash clothes in a stream in the Kaweni slum on the outskirts of Mamoudzou in the French Indian Ocean island of Mayotte, Thursday, Dec. 19, 2024, after Cyclone Chido. (AP Photo/Adrienne Surprenant)

A man stands on his roof in the Kaweni slum on the outskirts of Mamoudzou in the French Indian Ocean island of Mayotte, Thursday, Dec. 19, 2024, after Cyclone Chido. (AP Photo/Adrienne Surprenant)

A boy sits in his destroyed home in the Kaweni slum on the outskirts of Mamoudzou in the French Indian Ocean island of Mayotte, Thursday, Dec. 19, 2024, after Cyclone Chido. (AP Photo/Adrienne Surprenant)

A boy stands amidst debris in the Kaweni slum on the outskirts of Mamoudzou in the French Indian Ocean island of Mayotte, Thursday, Dec. 19, 2024, after Cyclone Chido. (AP Photo/Adrienne Surprenant)

People queue for gas in Mamoudzou in the French Indian Ocean island of Mayotte, Thursday, Dec. 19, 2024, after Cyclone Chido. (AP Photo/Adrienne Surprenant)

A young girl walks in the Kaweni slum on the outskirts of Mamoudzou, in the French Indian Ocean island of Mayotte, Thursday, Dec. 19, 2024, after Cyclone Chido. (AP Photo/Adrienne Surprenant)

A young girl walks in the Kaweni slum on the outskirts of Mamoudzou, in the French Indian Ocean island of Mayotte, Thursday, Dec. 19, 2024, after Cyclone Chido. (AP Photo/Adrienne Surprenant)

Women rest on a footbridge over a stream filled with debris in the Kaweni slum in the French Indian Ocean island of Mayotte, Thursday, Dec. 19, 2024, after Cyclone Chido. (AP Photo/Adrienne Surprenant)