ON-PREM

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.

The Commission for Regulation of Utilities (CRU) put an effective moratorium on connecting new server farms to the electricity grid, at least in the Dublin area, where much of the activity tends to concentrate.

This was lifted in December of last year, meaning electricity consumption still rose by a tenth while the moratorium was in place for nearly all of 2025.

Under stricter new regulations, server farm operators seeking a grid connection of more than 10 MW must also now provide generators or battery systems capable of providing the same power. They will be required to feed power back to the national grid, if and when required, a system already pioneered by Microsoft and Digital Realty.

Like a growing number of places, Ireland has also seen protests against datacenters, which perhaps isn't surprising given that there are understood to be more than 80 of them for a relatively small country of just over 5 million people.

Even in the US, the Trump administration is having to work to defuse public opposition to datacenters, asking the tech giants to commit that their expanding server farm estates won't spike energy bills or drain local water supplies across the US. ®