Ireland's data center electricity consumption is increasing by 360% in ten years and is expected to account for as much energy as each household combined - 23% of the national energy is sent to servers despite a moratorium on new data center network connections.

Ireland’s data center electricity demand increases 360% in ten years
Data centers now account for 23% of the entire country’s energy consumption.
New data centers can now only be built if certain energy demand considerations are met.

Ireland’s data center electricity consumption has increased by 360% in ten years and now accounts for 23% of the entire country’s electricity demand in 2026.

With total residential consumption accounting for 28% and demand for data centers increasing rapidly, it won’t be long before server farms surpass the consumption of Ireland’s population of just over five million.

These figures come from a report by Ireland’s Central Statistics Office, which shows that data center electricity consumption has increased by 10% year-on-year from 2024 to 2025, despite a moratorium on new data center grid connections enacted in 2021. In total, the country’s data centers consumed 7,663 GWh last year, despite the rest of Ireland’s demand only increasing 2% in the same period.

Ireland struggles with data center energy demand

The 2021 moratorium, established by Ireland’s Commission for Utility Regulation (CRU), required national grid operator EirGrid to stop processing standard power requests for data centers in the Greater Dublin area. Therefore, new data centers built after this ruling had to supply their own power on-site or build new projects in regions not subject to this restriction.

Consumption since 2021 has increased steadily, prompting the CRU to replace the previous moratorium with the Large Energy Users Connection Policy (LEU), which subjects new data center projects to a set of measures designed to alleviate the level of consumption on the national grid, while creating new energy sources.

Data centers larger than 10 MVA must now build flexible on-site power generation that meets 100% of demand, while sourcing at least 80% of their annual electricity from new unsubsidized renewable projects within six years.

Ireland has become a hub for big tech. Many companies have built European headquarters in the country, and hyperscale companies such as AWS, Google, Meta and Microsoft build and operate the majority of Ireland’s 89 data centers to power cloud infrastructure and artificial intelligence models.

As a result of rapidly increasing demand, Ireland now has the highest electricity cost in Europe, with Irish households paying around €480 ($550) more per year compared to the EU average. Higher electricity prices have been a catalyst for opposition to data centers, especially in the United States, where working-class communities are challenging new data center projects on an unprecedented scale.

This opposition has been a major contributor to the cancellation or delay of more than half of US data centers, with US citizens citing rising electricity costs, concerns about water consumption, and fears of AI replacing jobs as the main causes of opposition.

Google logo on black background next to text that says