Ireland's Data Centres Now Use 22 Per Cent of Its Electricity, More Than Every Urban Home Combined

No country has lived with the data centre boom as intensely as Ireland, and the Central Statistics Office's latest release shows how far it has gone. Metered electricity consumption by data centres rose by 10 per cent in 2024, from 6,335 GWh in 2023 to 6,969 GWh. Consumption by every other user, households and businesses together, rose by 3 per cent. Data centres took 22 per cent of all metered electricity in the country, up from 5 per cent in 2015.

To put that share in context, the CSO notes that urban households accounted for 18 per cent of metered consumption in 2024 and rural households for 10 per cent. Data centres alone now use more electricity than all of Ireland's urban homes. The release, published on 10 June, is the first to track data centre consumption quarterly from 2015. The CSO's statistician, Dr Grzegorz Głaczyński, also pointed to the broader category of large energy users, which typically includes the larger data centres.

They made up the largest share of metered consumption in 2024, at 31 per cent, with demand of 9,897 GWh, a 9 per cent increase on the previous year. Ireland became Europe's data centre hub for familiar reasons: a favourable corporate tax regime, an English-speaking workforce, the European headquarters of many American technology companies, a temperate climate that reduces cooling needs, and good subsea fibre connections. In larger markets such as Germany or the United States, data centres are a few per cent of national demand even when they dominate particular regions.

Since 2021 the CRU has required new data centres to bring dispatchable on-site generation or storage to match their demand, and the transmission system operator has treated new connections in the Dublin area with great caution because of constraints on the network there. Ireland's climate targets are set in carbon budgets, and the electricity sector has a ceiling on emissions.