Electricity consumption in Irish data centers has increased by 360% in ten years and is expected to account for as much electricity as all households combined: 23% of the national electricity sent to servers despite the moratorium on new data center network connections.

Electricity demand for Irish data centers reportedly increased by 360% in ten years
Data centers now represent 23% of the country’s electricity consumption
New data centers can now only be built if certain energy demand considerations are met.

Electricity consumption in Irish data centers has increased by 360% in ten years and now represents 23% of the entire country’s electricity demand in 2026.

With total residential consumption accounting for 28% and demand for data centers growing rapidly, server farms will soon outstrip the consumption of Ireland’s population of just over five million.

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

Ireland struggles with data center electricity demand

The 2021 moratorium, put in place by the Irish Utilities Regulatory Commission (CRU), forced the national grid operator, EirGrid, to stop processing standard energy requests for data centers in the Greater Dublin area. New data centers built after this decision therefore had to provide their own energy 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 User (LEU) Connection Policy, which subjects new data center projects to a set of measures intended to ease the level of consumption on the national grid, while creating new energy sources.

Data centers larger than 10 MVA must now build on-site flexible power generation that covers 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 their European headquarters in the country, with hyperscalers such as AWS, Google, Meta and Microsoft building and operating the majority of Ireland’s 89 data centers to power cloud infrastructure and AI models.

Due to the rapid increase in demand, Ireland now has the highest cost of electricity in Europe, with Irish households paying around €480 ($550) more per year than the EU average. Rising electricity prices have been a catalyst for opposition to data centers, particularly in the United States, where working-class communities are contesting new data center projects on an unprecedented scale.

This opposition has largely contributed to the cancellation or delay of more than half of US data centers, with US citizens citing rising electricity costs, concerns over water consumption and fears of job replacement by AI as the main causes of opposition.

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