Ireland hosts one of the world's fast-growing clusters of data centres, but is running headlong into the difficult consequences.

The server farms powering global tech giants now consume a fifth of the small nation's electricity, igniting concerns over both grid stability and Ireland's commitments to boost renewable energies and cut gas emissions.

Already home to over 80 data centres, a 2024 report by US-based researchers Synergy ranked Dublin behind only the US state of Virginia and Beijing in its density of such state-of-the-art facilities built for colossal amounts of data.

Vast energy-hungry warehouses around Dublin's ring road host thousands of servers handling massive amounts of cloud computing, storage and AI demands for data giants like Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon.

The fa

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