No to Tech Imperialism! Data Centres Are Consuming Our Natural Resources

Ireland’s data centres are consuming our drinking water while we face hosepipe bans and drought.

It is well documented that data centres, internationally, are consuming water at an alarming rate in order to whet the appetite of billionaire tech companies and imperialist regimes. Ireland, the tax haven for the rich and exploitative, hosts a number of these data centres for foreign entities, mostly in Dublin. Coincidentally (or not), the hosepipe ban that was put in place focused on Dublin county and surrounding areas. A 2024 report on the use of water by data centres in Ireland points out that there has already been a deficit in water supplies for Dublin, and that, naturally, as drought puts further pressure on these supplies, data centres demand for water rises with the temperature. While many data centres and other agencies publish reports on water consumption and plans to improve ‘sustainability’, these can often be misleading due to specifics in where this water was gathered from and how it is disposed of, as well as manipulation of statistics. Why are the Twenty-Six County government calling on the public to conserve water for ‘essential’ services, when each of the 100+ data centres are free to use upwards of half a million litres of water a day?

Irelands data centres are putting increased pressure not only on the water supply but on the electrical grid as well. Due to this, and the anticipated further increase in pressure as the government primes to continue its sell-out to multi-nationals, the Commission for the Regulation of Utilities (CRU) decided that it was ‘essential’ that the electricity networks receive significant investments – off the back of the Irish taxpayer, of course. According to their own report, this would result in an increase of about €8.50 per month per domestic customer. This money will go directly to upgrading the electricity grid for the express purpose of providing faster, more reliable electricity to the data centres connected to it. The companies running these data centres include CyrusOne, in part owned by KKR, notorious for their investments in Israel through their engagements with the entertainment industry and Microsoft, whose cloud storage services were found to have been used to log Palestinians personal and private data by Israel’s military intelligence unit. Irelands data centres are funnelling our natural resources towards Imperialist forces of the USA and “Israel”. This is not a conspiracy, this is traceable fact.

If there is any remaining doubt on whether the CRU value the wellbeing of the Irish people or our islands ecological wellbeing above multi-national corporate interest, it should be easily dispelled upon learning that (according to the Ditch) the Commissioner Tanya Harrington had been set to attend a secret conference by Peter Thiel – a billionaire venture capitalist who has said himself that his ‘bias’ is to ‘defer to Israel’ and who’s company Palantir is well known to be a dangerous data broker used by imperialist Israeli and US military agencies.

We are being pulled deeper and deeper into the belly of the beast, relying more and more on Israeli-American economic investment to sustain a cannibalistic economy that exploits the land and the population; simultaneously relying on our ecological resources and our human labour while depleting and undervaluing them daily. We cannot accept this reality any longer as, day by day, we plummet further towards an entire climate collapse. We are seeing quickly rising death tolls across the world – from fires in Spain, Chile, Australia, California, to floods in Indonesia, France, Kenya.

There must be an immediate end to exploitation of the people and of the land, not only on the island of Ireland, but around the globe.