Article URL: https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2026/07/11/irish-datacenters-now-guzzle-23-of-the-countrys-electricity/5270013 Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4…

Consumption rose another 10% while restrictions on most new grid connections remained around Dublin Electricity used by datacenters in Ireland increased by 10 percent during 2025, despite an effective moratorium on most new datacenter grid connections in the Dublin area. The latest figures from Ireland's Central Statistics Office (CSO) show that giant server farms now account for nearly a quarter of the country's metered electricity consumption. Their share rose to 23 percent in 2025 after passing 20 percent in 2023 and 14 percent in 2021 – up from just 5 percent way back in 2015. According to the CSO, the energy sucked up by massive bit barns increased by 10 percent last year, expanding from 6,973 gigawatt hours (GWh) in 2024 to 7,663 GWh in 2025. All other customers consumed just 2 percent more electricity over the same period. In fact, datacenters used more electricity than urban households, which accounted for 18 percent of metered use, and more than twice the rural-household share of 9 percent. "Datacenter consumption has grown every single year without exception, more than doubling between 2015 and 2019 from 1,240 GWh to 2,490 GWh, and tripling again between 2019 and 2025, reaching 7,663 GWh," commented Grzegorz Głaczyński, statistician in the CSO's Climate and Energy Division. Things got so bad in Ireland that at one point there were fears that the ever-expanding data dormitories might eat up as much as a third of the Emerald Isle's electricity by now.