Britain's data centre boom promises growth but Ireland's grid crisis shows the costs
The UK wants 100 new facilities while Dublin restricts them after electricity consumption hit 21% of national supply
An Irish government minister opening their morning briefing in July 2024 discovered that anonymous warehouse-like buildings scattered across the country now devour more electricity than every household in Dublin, Cork, and Limerick combined. Data centres have quietly grown to consume 21% of Ireland's entire electricity supply—a 400% surge since 2015 that's left officials scrambling to keep the lights on.
This isn't a hypothetical nightmare. It's Ireland's current reality, one that forced EirGrid to slam the brakes on new data centre developments in Dublin until 2028. Yet as Irish officials wrestle with an electricity crisis of their own making, Britain is charging full speed toward the same cliff edge.
The UK government has unveiled plans for roughly 100 new data centres within five years, rolling out the red carpet with "critical national infrastructure" status that promises taxpayer backing. Google's £740 million Hertfordshire project leads a parade of developments spanning from Welsh valleys to Manchester's outskirts. Ministers paint a seductive picture: digital sovereignty, economic renaissance, technological supremacy. But Ireland's painful education suggests these glittering promises come with bills that nobody wants to calculate.
The great jobs illusion
Strip away the press release rhetoric, and Britain's data centre gold rush reveals an uncomfortable truth about modern digital infrastructure. These billion-pound monuments to our connected age employ surprisingly few people once the construction crews pack up and leave.
Walk through a typical large data centre and you'll encounter perhaps 20 permanent staff rattling around facilities that cost more than most towns' annual budgets. The servers hum along largely unattended, monitored by sophisticated systems that need human intervention only when something breaks. Even Blackstone's eye-watering £10 billion investment in Blyth—a project large enough to power a small city—promises merely "hundreds" of long-term jobs. Compare that to the 1,200 construction workers who'll build it, then disappear to the next site.
Ireland's experience tells the same story. Despite 82 data centres contributing €7.3 billion to the economy since 2010, permanent employment remains stubbornly low. These facilities are digital factories designed to eliminate human labour, not create it. The handful of technicians, engineers, and security guards who keep them running represent a rounding error compared to the massive capital investments involved.
It's rather like building cathedrals that no one attends. Magnificent structures, certainly, but ones that generate impressive rental yields for their owners while providing little ongoing benefit to the communities hosting them.
Who pays for the party?
Here's where the story gets expensive for ordinary taxpayers. When the government designates data centres as "critical national infrastructure," it doesn't just mean they're important. It creates a legal obligation to support them with public investment, even when the profits flow entirely to private shareholders.
National Grid's December announcement of a £35 billion upgrade programme—nearly doubling Britain's transmission capacity—wasn't driven solely by renewable energy or housing needs. These electricity-hungry facilities demand guaranteed supply, forcing upgrades that will appear on everyone's energy bills for decades. A single large data centre consumes as much power as a city like Kilkenny, according to Irish researchers. Multiply that by 100 new facilities, and Britain faces infrastructure demands unlike anything since the railway boom.
Ireland learned this lesson the hard way. As data centre consumption exploded, the country experienced seven electricity system alerts between December 2020 and October 2021—compared to just 13 alerts in the entire previous decade. EirGrid's network, designed for a simpler era, began creaking under the strain. By 2022, officials faced the humiliating admission that their electricity system couldn't handle the digital economy they'd spent years courting.
The irony is delicious, if expensive. Countries compete fiercely to attract these investments with tax breaks and regulatory sweeteners, then discover they must spend billions on infrastructure to support facilities that provide minimal local employment. It's corporate welfare dressed up as economic development, with taxpayers picking up the infrastructure tab while shareholders collect the dividends.
Continental wisdom
Across the Channel, European neighbours watched Ireland's struggles and drew different conclusions. The Netherlands, once as eager as Britain to court data centre investment, imposed a national moratorium on hyperscale developments in 2022. Dutch officials had seen enough.
Amsterdam had already banned new centres in 2019, tired of watching valuable land disappear under windowless warehouses that employed virtually nobody. The Dutch approach now resembles careful urban planning rather than a free-for-all. New data centres must prove they can generate clean energy equivalent to their consumption, not simply buy certificates that shuffle responsibility elsewhere. Only two locations remain open for hyperscale development—areas with abundant renewable resources where these facilities won't compete with households for clean electricity.
It's a grown-up approach that acknowledges uncomfortable realities. Digital infrastructure matters enormously, but so does energy security, land use, and democratic accountability. The Netherlands chose strategic control over laissez-faire growth, prioritising long-term sustainability over short-term investment attraction.
Even Denmark, despite projecting six-fold growth in data centre energy use by 2030, insists on comprehensive planning frameworks. These countries learned from Ireland's mistakes rather than repeating them.
Green promises, black realities
The environmental contradictions lurking within Britain's data centre boom deserve honest examination. Tech giants routinely trumpet their renewable energy commitments, painting data centres as partners in the clean energy transition. The reality proves more complicated.
Google's global emissions rose 13% despite ambitious renewable pledges, driven largely by energy-hungry data centres and AI systems. The company, like its competitors, often meets "100% renewable" claims by purchasing certificates rather than generating additional clean power. When a data centre consumes renewable electricity, that power can't simultaneously heat homes or run factories making their own fossil fuel transition.
Ireland's experience illustrates this mathematical problem perfectly. The country aimed for 80% renewable electricity by 2030, a challenging but achievable target before data centres devoured an ever-growing share of clean generation. Now officials watch helplessly as climate goals recede further into the distance, sacrificed to accommodate facilities that promised to be part of the solution.
The AI revolution compounds these challenges exponentially. Modern AI data centres demand vastly more power than traditional facilities—some installations consume over 200 megawatts, enough electricity for 200,000 homes. Britain's embrace of artificial intelligence, economically sensible as it may be, multiplies energy demands that must somehow emerge from an already strained grid.
Ministers point hopefully to heat recovery schemes in London, Leeds, and Bristol, where data centres' waste heat warms nearby buildings. These initiatives represent genuine innovation, but they're drops in an ocean of energy consumption. Incremental improvements to an inherently energy-intensive industry cannot solve the fundamental sustainability equation.
The reckoning ahead
Britain stands at a crossroads that Ireland never recognised until crisis forced their hand. The attractions are real: Jensen Huang of Nvidia wasn't wrong to describe the UK as having "the largest AI ecosystem in the world without its own infrastructure." Digital sovereignty matters. Economic opportunities abound. Technological leadership beckons.
But Ireland's forced moratorium represents policy failure, not market forces. Dublin's officials spent years celebrating investment announcements and ribbon-cutting ceremonies, only to discover they'd created an electricity monster that threatened the entire grid's stability. Their crisis was predictable, preventable, and entirely self-inflicted.
The Netherlands demonstrates that countries can maintain competitive positions without surrendering strategic control. Rather than competing primarily on tax rates and regulatory accommodation, nations can differentiate through intelligent planning that ensures digital infrastructure strengthens rather than strains national objectives.
This requires conversations British politicians seem reluctant to have. How many data centres can the UK accommodate without triggering Irish-style grid alerts? What level of public subsidy represents reasonable value given the minimal employment returns? Can Britain achieve both digital sovereignty and net zero targets when these facilities compete directly with households for renewable energy?
The current approach assumes these tensions will resolve themselves through market magic and technological optimism. Ireland's experience suggests otherwise. Better to grapple with these contradictions now, while policy choices remain available, than face Dublin's impossible position of restricting development they'd spent years encouraging.
The data centre boom offers genuine prizes for countries that approach it strategically. But strategy requires acknowledging costs alongside benefits, planning for constraints rather than hoping they'll disappear, and learning from neighbours' struggles rather than repeating them at scale. Ireland provides the lesson. The question is whether Britain will read it before writing its own cautionary tale.