‘It’s like we’re being robbed’: The relentless march of data centres

Dublin: The sun is setting over the rolling fields near a small town in Ireland as Sorcha O’Neill and Dolores Moore point towards a large stretch of farmland that is meant to be bulldozed to make way for a row of data centres.

We are standing at the edge of their suburb in Naas, a centuries-old town in County Kildare, at an old fence covered in blackberry bushes. Within weeks, they fear, their council will approve the next step in building the data factories of the internet age.

“We were never informed about this,” says O’Neill, a former local councillor who understands the planning system. Only four weeks earlier, she tells me, she was checking plans for a more distant data centre when she noticed the paperwork for the farmland in an area known as Jigginstown.

Now the two neighbours have joined the agonising debate in Ireland about the scale of these new projects. The country already has about 72 data centres and is forecast to have dozens more in only a few years because it is so attractive for developers. It has skilled workers, low company tax rates, a cool climate and good land.

Most importantly, it has the location. The facilities here, close to the high-speed lines that connect Europe to America, can quickly crunch data for artificial intelligence applications being used by businesses and consumers in the world’s wealthiest nations. Already, these facilities use one-fifth of the electricity from the nation’s grid. Soon it will be one-third. That makes Ireland a test case in the march of the data centres.

O’Neill and Moore discovered too late that Kildare County Council had zoned the land next to their homes for data centre use by the owner, Microsoft . That decision, made without fanfare several years ago, now makes it very difficult for them to challenge the outcome and ensure the land is zoned only for agriculture, as it was for years.

Moore, a former catering worker, has been in this community since 1995. “I moved here from Dublin to make a better life for my children,” she says. “And my kids loved it here.” Now she worries about the construction noise from the project and the changes when the data centres are built.

O’Neill, a tech worker, talks about the scale of the project when we drive around the perimeter of the farmland, passing horse studs and an old canal. “Who’s going to want to buy to live next to a data centre?” she asks.

Nobody in this community knows how big the data centres may be because those plans are yet to be unveiled. For many, the goal is to stop the plans at a council meeting on September 9, before the developers take the next step.

A short drive away, just off the motorway into Dublin, stands a sign of things to come. The Grange Castle Business Park hosts tech giants including Amazon, Google and Microsoft. It is also home to a vast Pfizer facility that makes medicines for global markets – a high-tech contrast to the old pubs and traditional music found in Dublin’s city centre.

O’Neill stops outside a long row of white buildings at Site 075. There are no logos on the fence, but this is Microsoft’s address.