Data centers, electricity consumption quintupled in ten years in Ireland: but can the grid hold?

The Irish Central Statistics Office (CSO) has certified that in 2025, the country’s data centers consumed 7,663 GWh of electricity, accounting for 23% of national consumption measured. This figure marks a jump of 10% compared to the 6,973 GWh recorded in 2024, while the rest of the population increased their consumption by just 2% in the same period. Irish server farms are now approaching the weight of the residential sector, which, between urban and rural housing, is around 28% of the total.

In 2015, data centers accounted for only 5% of national electricity consumption. Growth, according to the CSO, has never stopped: on a quarterly basis, consumption rose from 291 GWh in the first quarter of 2015 to 1,991 GWh in the last quarter of 2025, an increase of 584%. Grzegorz Głączyński, a statistician from the CSO's Climate and Energy Division, summarized the phenomenon: the consumption of data centers has increased every single year over the past decade, without any sign of slowing down.

The Republic of Ireland has about 5 million inhabitants and hosts 89 data centers, concentrated mainly in the Greater Dublin Area. Most, including the largest facilities, belong to hyperscalers such as Microsoft, AWS, Google, and Meta, which manage infrastructures dedicated to their cloud services and artificial intelligence models. The rest of the capacity is in the hands of colocation operators who lease space and power to third parties.

A new energy policy replaces the old moratorium on new plants

The initial boom, linked to cloud storage and social media, has turned into a surge as generative artificial intelligence began to require industrial-scale computing power. Already in November 2021, the Commission for Regulation of Utilities (CRU) had effectively imposed a moratorium on new connections to the power grid in the Dublin area, halting standard requests and forcing developers to generate their own energy or relocate.

Despite the blockade, consumption continued to rise, to the extent that the International Energy Agency had predicted in 2024 that data centers could account for a third of national electricity by 2026—a projection that the data released by the CSO does not rule out. At the end of 2025, the CRU replaced the old moratorium with the new Large Energy Users (LEU) Connection Policy, which requires new plants over 10 MVA to generate 100% of the necessary energy independently and to cover at least 80% of annual consumption with new unsubsidized renewable sources within six years of inception.

This phenomenon is not limited to Ireland, clearly. Globally, electricity consumption by data centers is expected to grow by 26% in 2026, and in the United States, skepticism toward these plants is now widespread: 70% of the population expresses opposition to having them built near their homes. Local protests have already led to the cancellation of over 75 data center projects just in the first quarter of 2026.