‘You can’t decarbonise without digitisation, you can’t increase digitisation without data centres’

With the latest CSO figures pointing to data centres in the Republic using as much electricity as urban households last year despite an effective moratorium on new connections to the grid in the Greater Dublin Area, does the proliferation of data centres here in recent times represent a real threat to our carbon emissions goals?

Ciarán Hancock is joined by Irish Times Business Reporter Ian Curran to talk us through what those latest CSO figures mean, while director of cloud infrastructure Ireland Michael McCarthy and energy researcher at UCC Paul Deane, give the pros and cons of so many data centres setting up here.