The Government “cannot shut the door on data centres” because it would damage the economy and damage workers at a time when there will be massive investment in artificial intelligence (AI) across Europe, the Taoiseach has said.
Micheál Martin said “the AI revolution is the most profound economic revolution currently occurring since the 19th-century industrial revolution” but it has a problem because “it uses enormous amounts of energy”.
He said they had to solve the challenges data centres threw up but insisted that Ireland could not turn its back on data centres. To do so would “be sending a signal that we do not want to participate in an evolving, growing, innovative economy that will develop, despite us”.
Mr Martin was responding in the Dáil to People Before Profit TD Paul Murphy, who accused him of sounding “like a man who has drunk too much of the big-tech Kool-Aid”.
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The Dublin South-West TD raised the issue following publication of the report by the CRU (Commission for Regulation of Utilities) on proposed new rules for new data centres seeking connection to the national grid.
[ Data centres to supply electricity under proposed new rulesOpens in new window ]
Mr Murphy said the CRU was allowing data centres to decide for themselves whether they used renewable or fossil fuels.
Data centres “are currently using more than 20 per cent of our electricity, more than 10 times the European average. They will be using one-third of our electricity by the end of this decade.
“Over the past five years, all of the additional wind energy produced in Ireland has been more than outstripped by data centre growth. The programme for government gives the green light for even more of these data centres,” he said.
The Dublin South-West TD claimed that “all the signs point towards the Government supporting a full commercial LNG terminal in Kerry, making Donald Trump and the Healy-Raes very happy but ignoring the science, which says that imported LNG is even dirtier than coal”.
He said the Government must not follow the US president “in abandoning emissions reductions targets. There can be no more of this hypocrisy of imposing carbon taxes on ordinary people while allowing big tech to blow through the carbon budgets”.
The Taoiseach said Mr Murphy is “as prolific a user” of the services data centres provide as anyone and “probably more so”. But the “new hostility to data centres” is about Mr Murphy’s “eternal struggle against the great western capitalist evil”.
He acknowledged that “AI uses enormous amounts of energy. That is a problem. The US says it will be fossil fuels. The French say it will be nuclear power.
“Ireland will have wind energy but there will be a gap in between.”
Mr Martin added the “the bottom line” with LNG is energy security. “The nation has security vulnerability if anything happens to our gas pipeline.”
