Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Irish datacenters now guzzle 23% of the country's electricity

theregister.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 329 posts

Re: Irish datacenters now guzzle 23% of the country's electricity

#241

Post by dingaling »

anigbrowl wrote: post #125
cbmuser wrote: post #68

Ireland consumes roughly 40 TWh per year, that’s less than the production of four EPR reactors or two times Hinkley Point C. The country could easily solve its electricity problems with nuclear power. They can ask South Korea for help who built four reactors in UAE with 12 years which now provide 25% of the country’s electricity.

Nuclear power is a non-starter in IReland because the Sellafield nuclear plant in the UK emitted pollution of various for years but UK officials covered it up. The actual severity of the pollution is open to debate but the loss of trusthad a generational impact. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield#Incidents

Yet they're happy to take nuclear-generated electricity from France...

Re: Irish datacenters now guzzle 23% of the country's electricity

#242

Post by esseph »

_3u10 wrote: post #160
mrtksn wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course value is created, the problem is that the value is not created for the people who endure the issues and the pricing is apparently wrong. It is similar to building a SPAM factory somewhere people live on pork, paying higher prices for the pigs and buy all the pigs but not enough for the people who sold you the pigs to use the proceeds to increase the number of pigs or replace them with some other source and…

So we should allocate electricity to less productive uses to benefit people the most? People should just keep driving inefficient cars rather than having gas prices increase so they can evaluate whether getting a more efficient car makes sense for them.

> People should just keep driving inefficient cars rather than having gas prices increase so they can evaluate whether getting a more efficient car makes sense for them.

You're assuming many can even buy a car right now, let alone a new one.

Re: Irish datacenters now guzzle 23% of the country's electricity

#243

Post by esseph »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #204
rogerrogerr wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There IS value being created, or people wouldn't use the tools. While I do think there is value being created, I think this form of argument is not as watertight as it appears at first glance. Humans are very capable of behaving irrationally. I think there is a lot of harmful, negative “work” being done by AI today. Creating fake videos for Facebook, running girlfriend bots, automated scams, etc. Even employees jus…

This might just be my bubble, but us there that much AI being used for girlfriends/scams, or even reels these days? Most people I know use it as a tool to do things for them, technical or otherwise. Even the loneliest people I know don't want to talk to a clanker unless there's at least a pretense of work being done.

> This might just be my bubble, but us there that much AI being used for girlfriends/scams, or even reels these days?

How would you react if you got a panicked call from your spouse and it came from their phone number?

To answer your question, it's a series of different but huge problems.

https://www.iansresearch.com/resources/all-blogs/post/securi...

https://www.rfi.fr/en/international-news/20260603-20-minutes...

https://cbsaustin.com/news/local/deepfake-scams-are-creeping...

There's also a whole industry of basically "virtual onlyfans" models that generate a TON of content and ad impressions on everything from Instagram, X, TikTok, even Twitch.tv

Re: Irish datacenters now guzzle 23% of the country's electricity

#244

Post by [deleted] »

pbgcp2026 wrote: post #143
infinite_spin wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Dump #datacenters - they are not critical Internet infrastructure! what is the alternative? I don't think self hosting is a robust/defensible option for a majority of internet services

Tapes. Trackloads of them. Ferries with lorries with tapes. You know, the European GDPR compliant way. /s

[deleted]

Re: Irish datacenters now guzzle 23% of the country's electricity

#246

Post by infinite_spin »

spwa4 wrote: post #56
infinite_spin wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Dump #datacenters - they are not critical Internet infrastructure! what is the alternative? I don't think self hosting is a robust/defensible option for a majority of internet services

Nobody hosts datacenters in Ireland because of capacity reasons. It's not a good location for power, people or connectivity. They host them there for tax reasons. You can bet your firstborn these datacenters are only the exact size that is the minimum allowed by tax law, not a square millimeter more. Yes, datacenters are critical internet infrastructure. But in Ireland they're more like a sailing ship with the sails…

https://enterprise.gov.ie/en/publications/publication-files/...

> it is estimated that in 2024, of the order of ~€104bn in annual GVA, 876,000 jobs and €14.6bn in annual employment related tax was enabled by the availability of digital infrastructure provided by data centres located in Ireland.

Seems like the economics of hosting these data centers benefits Ireland substantially, even with their tax breaks.

Re: Irish datacenters now guzzle 23% of the country's electricity

#247

Post by mrtksn »

protocolture wrote: post #234
mrtksn wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not important whose fault it is, I am sure that the datacenter people believe that they got such a good deal and everything is peachy.

It does matter. Screeching about datacenters when you cant get your polity to price energy correctly is not an issue with datacenters.

It’s not important who’s fault it is, it’s probably the politicians who were looking for short term gain that they can present as creating jobs or maybe even taking bribes to issue permits. It’s not that important who’s personally to blame.

Re: Irish datacenters now guzzle 23% of the country's electricity

#248

Post by mrtksn »

dingaling wrote: post #241
anigbrowl wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear power is a non-starter in IReland because the Sellafield nuclear plant in the UK emitted pollution of various for years but UK officials covered it up. The actual severity of the pollution is open to debate but the loss of trusthad a generational impact. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield#Incidents

Yet they're happy to take nuclear-generated electricity from France...

The electricity from France wouldn’t carry any radiation, their issue with the electricity from nuclear would be related to having the reactor at close distance because if mismanaged can indeed spread radiator.

Re: Irish datacenters now guzzle 23% of the country's electricity

#249

Post by hinkley »

thin_carapace wrote: post #191
hinkley wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, fair enough. But once we stop doing things entirely because we are jealous of how some people use it, everything gets a bit dimmer. I'm all for pricing externalities in. There are some obvious ways to do that with plastic surgeons on scholarships. There are ways to do that with natural resources and power generation and distribution. There's also perhaps space for making deals with the government where load she…

not sure if you have enabled dead comments or not, somebodys comment was killed for calling you pedantic. anyway nose jobs and skin grafts are both done by a plastic surgeon; one of these procedures saves lives and the other doesn't. the argument is that the taxpayer should prioritize life saving over vanity projects. accusations of jealousy make it seem as though you have missed the point entirely, whether intention…

You're slicing that sentence pretty thin.

I said "But once we stop doing things entirely because we are jealous of how some people use it"

That's not jealousy, that's totalitarianism. I'm not going to let you do it at all because I don't like it. The "reason" is jealousy, the action is control.

The electric grid and education are both a sort of commons. Once you start telling people how or if they're allowed to use it, you better have a good goddamned reason for doing so. You can block a data center - and we probably should block some of these data centers - the way people have blocked Walmarts: by demonstrating that the store is entirely extractive and is a drain on local infrastructure and impoverishes communities, and either make them make the community whole or fuck off to be someone else's problem.

If you start moralizing how people can use electricity to block something like this, you're going to quickly rediscover that some people think vibrators are morally wrong, and they'll try to block those too.

I started all of this talking about politics. How you do something matters as much as if or why, once you include everyone instead of just deciding you know best for everyone else.

Re: Irish datacenters now guzzle 23% of the country's electricity

#250

Post by bryan_w »

cadamsdotcom wrote: post #216
jmyeet wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah this is just completely wrong. Data centers pay sub-market rates for electricity (as well as getting tax relief, generally). Generally, they use so much electricity that more infrastructure needs to be built. Who pays for that? Not the data center. The utility's capex is spread across all customers (sometimes minus the data center). Then the utility needs to generate moer power or buy it from elsewhere. That's t…

For some reason Ireland's government is offering favorable conditions for datacenter construction. Don't you ever stop to wonder why?

In their world, everyone everywhere is corrupt. This saves them from having to deal with nuance and other such difficult topics
Post reply on HN