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Ireland has been becoming a popular site for the tech industry due to favorable tax laws and cheap electricity. I'm hoping they turn some of those laws around. The data center population grew by more than a third, and now they eat more electricity than the entirety of their residential population!
The problem is, data centers don't create a lot of jobs. They generate construction jobs for building them, and once built, the jobs go away or on to the next gig. They're mostly dark operations: no lights on except when someone is in the building. They might have some security guards who sweep around the exterior of the site occasionally. They maintain internal spares for when disk drives or arrays or servers go bad, they just fail over to new units. So these server farms do not generate a lot of jobs.
From the article, Metered electricity consumption by data centres increased from 290 gigawatt hours in the period from January to March 2015 to 1,058 in October to December 2021.. Six years. 3x fold in consumption. Dublin has stopped allowing construction and connection of data centers because they can't increase power production in the area.
Some tax money pours in, but it doesn't do much for the employment situation. Meanwhile, electricity is consumed, strain is put on the power grid, and heat and carbon are generated.
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/data-centres-now-consuming-more-electricity-than-rural-homes-cso-1.4868221
The problem is, data centers don't create a lot of jobs. They generate construction jobs for building them, and once built, the jobs go away or on to the next gig. They're mostly dark operations: no lights on except when someone is in the building. They might have some security guards who sweep around the exterior of the site occasionally. They maintain internal spares for when disk drives or arrays or servers go bad, they just fail over to new units. So these server farms do not generate a lot of jobs.
From the article, Metered electricity consumption by data centres increased from 290 gigawatt hours in the period from January to March 2015 to 1,058 in October to December 2021.. Six years. 3x fold in consumption. Dublin has stopped allowing construction and connection of data centers because they can't increase power production in the area.
Some tax money pours in, but it doesn't do much for the employment situation. Meanwhile, electricity is consumed, strain is put on the power grid, and heat and carbon are generated.
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/data-centres-now-consuming-more-electricity-than-rural-homes-cso-1.4868221
