What fraction of Irish GDP is linked to datacenters? If I remember correctly from the pre-AI world, datacenters were at the heart of Dublin's industrial strategy, and they were credibly linked to a double-digit fraction of production.
They do pay tax, 12.5%. Plus employment during construction and maintenance. There's also ancillary investment in national infrastructure such as Google's CO2 battery
Nobody hosts datacenters in Ireland because of capacity reasons. It's not a good location for power, people or connectivity. They host them there for tax reasons. You can bet your firstborn these datacenters are only the exact size that is the minimum allowed by tax law, not a square millimeter more.
Yes, datacenters are critical internet infrastructure. But in Ireland they're more like a sailing ship with the sails mounted underwater.
Maybe we ought to take away society's Spotify etc. and go back to trading cassettes.
I predict it will last all of two days.
You see the mentally ill chaos unfold within hours when DNS or a CDN goes down. Imagine taking their datacenter-dependent toys away for more than a day.
How will they navigate job interviews (in between datacenter protests) without relying on ChatGPT to feed them answers?
They chose to add the word "guzzle". They could have just written "Irish datacenters now use 23% of the country's electricity". But they made the editorial decision to add in "guzzle". What's the word for this type of propaganda, where they add in some sort of adjective that wasn't needed, in order to prime the reader on how to think/feel, rather than just objectively reporting the facts? What are the odds that the content of the article is objective and factual, given the decisions they made with the headline?
>What's the word for this type of propaganda, where they add in some sort of adjective that wasn't needed, in order to prime the reader on how to think/feel, rather than just objectively reporting the facts?
It's called an editorial.
It's not supposed to be a mere report, concerned with respecting any random person's feeling about how all electricity consumption is equally valid and should be equally respected.
It's called a value judgment and an emotionally charged tone. That's certainly a form of editorial but IMO not the good kind. If an outlet seeks to advocate for a cause it ought to do so in a well reasoned manner and with a professional tone.
They basically re-report press releases. I've dealt with The Register as well as their sister publications back when I was still in product.
The Reg keeps a snarky tone, but immediately becomes deferential once a vendor begins a content campaign with them.
They also operated a bot account on HN for years that was spamming Register accounts for almost 3 years and accumulated 66K karma until I and a couple others complained about it.
"Unwanted industrial users consuming over 1/5th Ireland's electricity."
(Ireland has challenges getting enough renewable energy to the island, as well as connecting the northern and southern parts with transmission due to local citizens not friendly to the need for transmission infra; data centers do not belong in Ireland, build them in countries in Europe that have excess clean energy, Spain and France specifically, and eat any latency as unavoidable)
Data Centers have been the cornerstone of Ireland's economy since the mid-2000a when the IDA began wooing tech FDI specifically by calling out data center expansion opportunities within the EU [0].
Also, if Europeans actually wish to have a sovereign tech industry, they need compute capacity.
Complaining about American tech dependency and complaining about the steps to reduce it is literally contradictory.
A few years ago I was reading a recruitment report and was surprised to learn that Ireland is a large source of data scientists, so it’s no surprise really
Yep. IDA's services FDI model helped attract much of the tech scene that exists in Ireland today. In the 1990s and 2000s no one would have expected Ireland to become the tech hub it is today without the IDA's foresightedness.
Ireland has been a data center hub for decades - especially thanks to the IDA successfully wooing Microsoft back in 2007 [0], and it helped played a role in helping Ireland partially recover from the AIB and housing collapse back in 2008 and become the tech hub it is today. Heck, it was the corneestone of the IDA's tech FDI policy back then [1].
Heck, Google itself only expanded in Ireland back in the 2000s in large part because they worked on acquiring Colt to build their European CoLo in Ireland, and data centers now represent around 18% of Ireland's total GVA [2].
It's not misappropriation. Other countries within the EU could be much more business incorporation and FDI friendly, and IDA Ireland tends to be one of the more competent trade promotion agencies within the EU.
Why should Ireland undermine 13% of it's GDP [0]?
Edit: can't reply
> Telling American multinationals you will have them pay 0 tax isn't exactly a "tax policy" as such
Ireland's corporate tax rate is 12.5% but drops to 6.25% if it's qualified R&D and IP income with an added 35% R&D tax credit.
It's attractive, but CEE states like Poland and Czechia can (and often do) match that.
The biggest attraction for Ireland is the fact that everyone speaks English in Ireland, and Irish tax and corporate legal firms have worked with American firms since the 1990s, which reduces the headache.
> Or to 0.005% if you're Apple
Which ended in 2014, yet Ireland still remains attractive despite the deal with Apple.
At the end of the day, Ireland simply executed much better than it's developmental peers in the 1990s (Spain, Czechia, Russia, Cyprus, Greece in 1991 based on HDI) simply because it was much more business friendly.
A parking structure owned by a shopping center might offer free parking in order to drive business goals. That's as much a policy as it would be if they were to charge a fee.
>Ireland's corporate tax rate is 12.5% but drops to 6.25% if it's qualified R&D and IP income with an added 35% R&D tax credit.
Or to 0.005% if you're Apple.
>The Commission's investigation concluded that Ireland granted illegal tax benefits to Apple, which enabled it to pay substantially less tax than other businesses over many years. In fact, this selective treatment allowed Apple to pay an effective corporate tax rate of 1 per cent on its European profits in 2003 down to 0.005 per cent in 2014.
FB just put shovels in the ground on a datacenter in Alberta. Bringing a new nat gas plant online nearby but it's a little quicker to bring the DC on than the plant.
I lived in Ontario for 18 years and found power to be quite expensive compared to the midwestern US state I lived in before and after.
I believe this is due to the concentrated population centers needing to subsidize the transmission to the least populated areas, and would guess this would have an impact on energy costs for data centers in Canada. But again, my experience is (mostly) limited to SW Ontario, where everything is fairly expensive.
That is about 3% of California's total energy usage
Or about 11,000 GWh which is about 4% of California which means without the theatrics:
California has 4x more data centers than Ireland.
California: ~810 watts per person. (278,000 GWh / 39.4 million people)
Ireland: ~690 watts per person. (32,000 GWh / 5.3 million people)
We have air conditioning and that may be why we use more POWAH
What fraction of Irish GDP is linked to datacenters? If I remember correctly from the pre-AI world, datacenters were at the heart of Dublin's industrial strategy, and they were credibly linked to a double-digit fraction of production.
Irelands big pull to these companies is to not tax them as much as other countries.
That said, once built and lit up, it's hard to move a data center to another country.
Even in the hypotenuse that datacenters would double Ireland’s GDP what real positive impact would it have if they pay zero taxes?
They do pay tax, 12.5%. Plus employment during construction and maintenance. There's also ancillary investment in national infrastructure such as Google's CO2 battery
Did you mean hypothesis?
Are we allowed post masto links? I'm an Irish techie. I shot a video about this. Sorry about the camera shake:
https://mastodon.ie/@handi/116900076149521593
> Dump #datacenters - they are not critical Internet infrastructure!
what is the alternative? I don't think self hosting is a robust/defensible option for a majority of internet services
Nobody hosts datacenters in Ireland because of capacity reasons. It's not a good location for power, people or connectivity. They host them there for tax reasons. You can bet your firstborn these datacenters are only the exact size that is the minimum allowed by tax law, not a square millimeter more.
Yes, datacenters are critical internet infrastructure. But in Ireland they're more like a sailing ship with the sails mounted underwater.
Maybe we ought to take away society's Spotify etc. and go back to trading cassettes.
I predict it will last all of two days.
You see the mentally ill chaos unfold within hours when DNS or a CDN goes down. Imagine taking their datacenter-dependent toys away for more than a day.
How will they navigate job interviews (in between datacenter protests) without relying on ChatGPT to feed them answers?
Sounds like a circular dependency to me.
Why wouldn't you be allowed to?
Excellent video. Thanks for making it. Thanks for sharing it.
They chose to add the word "guzzle". They could have just written "Irish datacenters now use 23% of the country's electricity". But they made the editorial decision to add in "guzzle". What's the word for this type of propaganda, where they add in some sort of adjective that wasn't needed, in order to prime the reader on how to think/feel, rather than just objectively reporting the facts? What are the odds that the content of the article is objective and factual, given the decisions they made with the headline?
>What's the word for this type of propaganda, where they add in some sort of adjective that wasn't needed, in order to prime the reader on how to think/feel, rather than just objectively reporting the facts?
It's called an editorial.
It's not supposed to be a mere report, concerned with respecting any random person's feeling about how all electricity consumption is equally valid and should be equally respected.
It's called a value judgment and an emotionally charged tone. That's certainly a form of editorial but IMO not the good kind. If an outlet seeks to advocate for a cause it ought to do so in a well reasoned manner and with a professional tone.
Can you link to any examples of a good editorial by this measure?
Journalism is allowed to have an opinion, that doesn't make it propaganda.
there's an unnatural amount of doomerism against datacenters, of exactly this kind. It's pretty obviously astroturfed.
Is The Register known for objectively reporting facts? If so, I have fundamentally misunderstood it for a quarter century.
> objectively reporting facts?
I believe so. They're not known for neutrally reporting them, which is different.
Do Ireland's data centers objectively "guzzle" electricity?
I don't have any problem with The Register, but reporting laden with value-judging adjectives is not objective.
They basically re-report press releases. I've dealt with The Register as well as their sister publications back when I was still in product.
The Reg keeps a snarky tone, but immediately becomes deferential once a vendor begins a content campaign with them.
They also operated a bot account on HN for years that was spamming Register accounts for almost 3 years and accumulated 66K karma until I and a couple others complained about it.
Guess if people who write articles like LLMs
"Unwanted industrial users consuming over 1/5th Ireland's electricity."
(Ireland has challenges getting enough renewable energy to the island, as well as connecting the northern and southern parts with transmission due to local citizens not friendly to the need for transmission infra; data centers do not belong in Ireland, build them in countries in Europe that have excess clean energy, Spain and France specifically, and eat any latency as unavoidable)
Yeah, but Ireland has a looser regulatory environment where it’s easier for a data centre operator to buy off the relevant government regulators.
> data centers do not belong in Ireland...
Data Centers have been the cornerstone of Ireland's economy since the mid-2000a when the IDA began wooing tech FDI specifically by calling out data center expansion opportunities within the EU [0].
Also, if Europeans actually wish to have a sovereign tech industry, they need compute capacity.
Complaining about American tech dependency and complaining about the steps to reduce it is literally contradictory.
[0] - https://www.siliconrepublic.com/science/ireland-has-the-pote...
Is there a snowball effect where a big AWS region attracts more usage? Those snowballs are more significant in smaller countries?
Yes, the largest regions get new services launched in them first, and the widest range of hardware, encouraging more people to use them.
A few years ago I was reading a recruitment report and was surprised to learn that Ireland is a large source of data scientists, so it’s no surprise really
Yep. IDA's services FDI model helped attract much of the tech scene that exists in Ireland today. In the 1990s and 2000s no one would have expected Ireland to become the tech hub it is today without the IDA's foresightedness.
Ireland has been a data center hub for decades - especially thanks to the IDA successfully wooing Microsoft back in 2007 [0], and it helped played a role in helping Ireland partially recover from the AIB and housing collapse back in 2008 and become the tech hub it is today. Heck, it was the corneestone of the IDA's tech FDI policy back then [1].
Heck, Google itself only expanded in Ireland back in the 2000s in large part because they worked on acquiring Colt to build their European CoLo in Ireland, and data centers now represent around 18% of Ireland's total GVA [2].
[0] - https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/hyperscalers/microsoft-p...
[1] - https://www.siliconrepublic.com/science/ireland-has-the-pote...
[2] - https://www.iiea.com/blog/data-centres-in-ireland-the-state-...
That and misappropriating a lot of the taxes of other countries in the process
It's not misappropriation. Other countries within the EU could be much more business incorporation and FDI friendly, and IDA Ireland tends to be one of the more competent trade promotion agencies within the EU.
Why should Ireland undermine 13% of it's GDP [0]?
Edit: can't reply
> Telling American multinationals you will have them pay 0 tax isn't exactly a "tax policy" as such
Ireland's corporate tax rate is 12.5% but drops to 6.25% if it's qualified R&D and IP income with an added 35% R&D tax credit.
It's attractive, but CEE states like Poland and Czechia can (and often do) match that.
The biggest attraction for Ireland is the fact that everyone speaks English in Ireland, and Irish tax and corporate legal firms have worked with American firms since the 1990s, which reduces the headache.
> Or to 0.005% if you're Apple
Which ended in 2014, yet Ireland still remains attractive despite the deal with Apple.
At the end of the day, Ireland simply executed much better than it's developmental peers in the 1990s (Spain, Czechia, Russia, Cyprus, Greece in 1991 based on HDI) simply because it was much more business friendly.
[0] - https://www.trade.gov/country-commercial-guides/ireland-digi...
Telling American multinationals you will have them pay 0 tax isn't exactly a "tax policy" as such.
A parking structure owned by a shopping center might offer free parking in order to drive business goals. That's as much a policy as it would be if they were to charge a fee.
>Ireland's corporate tax rate is 12.5% but drops to 6.25% if it's qualified R&D and IP income with an added 35% R&D tax credit.
Or to 0.005% if you're Apple.
>The Commission's investigation concluded that Ireland granted illegal tax benefits to Apple, which enabled it to pay substantially less tax than other businesses over many years. In fact, this selective treatment allowed Apple to pay an effective corporate tax rate of 1 per cent on its European profits in 2003 down to 0.005 per cent in 2014.
Canada seems better positioned for datacenters since they can power them locally with a multitude of options and not impact the local grid.
FB just put shovels in the ground on a datacenter in Alberta. Bringing a new nat gas plant online nearby but it's a little quicker to bring the DC on than the plant.
I lived in Ontario for 18 years and found power to be quite expensive compared to the midwestern US state I lived in before and after.
I believe this is due to the concentrated population centers needing to subsidize the transmission to the least populated areas, and would guess this would have an impact on energy costs for data centers in Canada. But again, my experience is (mostly) limited to SW Ontario, where everything is fairly expensive.
I read this as 'Irish Dancers now guzzle....'
I'm sure they work up a sweat but probably not on the same order of magnitude
NO SHIT SHERLOCK, TEGH BROS WERE ALWAYS THE BANE OF OUR 'MODERN' EXISTENCE.