Here's why data centres in Ireland consume more than homes
The key factor is the boom in artificial intelligence, for which the world is postponing the goodbye to coal
3' min read
3' min read
It was only a matter of time. And now that time has come. 2023 was the year in which, for the first time in history, data centre electricity consumption surpassed that of all homes in the country combined. It happened in Ireland, and the figures were made official in recent hours by the Central Statistics Office in Dublin.
According to the agency, data centres accounted for 21% of all measured electricity consumption in 2023, up from 5% in 2015 and 18% in 2022. And for the first time, their electricity consumption exceeded that of the country's total households, at 18% in 2023, down from 19% the year before.
Ireland is one of the European countries where some very important data centres are located. These include the Microsoft Dublin Data Centre, Facebook Clonee Ireland, Google's Grange Castle II and the Amazon AWS DUB2. And if 2023 was the year of overtaking, the forecast is for consolidation: according to data from the National Energy and Climate Plan, the increase in demand for data processing - driven by the boom in generative artificial intelligence - could lead to Ireland's data centres consuming around 31 per cent of the country's electricity within the next three years.
Energy Intelligence
.The debate on the Irish overtaking cannot but start with generative artificial intelligence. Because it is precisely the boom of this new technology that has redesigned the world's energy plans, as ChatGPT and its sisters require huge amounts of computing power that violently impact consumption.
One of the most recent estimates states that by 2027 the entire AI industry could consume between 85 and 134 Terawatt hours per year. Although the various GenAI models have already undergone major slimming down in terms of consumption, the estimates do not dispel doubts about the long-term sustainability of this technology. Especially in view of one fact: current chips are definitely energy-intensive.
