Irish datacenters now guzzle 23% of the country's electricity

https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2026/07/11/irish-datacenters-now-guzzle-23-of-the-countrys-electricity/5270013

40•Bender•57m ago

Comments

thegrim33•43m ago

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?

bgun•37m ago

I’m not sure what the word is for what you consider propaganda, but the word for your brand of knee-jerk defense of corporate interests that pillage the resources, culture, and well-being of entire societies in the name of profit, is “bootlicking”.

JuniperMesos•36m ago

This post is propaganda for exactly the same cause that The Register article is propaganda for.

EA-3167•20m ago

What's the cause?

arcticfox•24m ago

Lol the word guzzle in this context is just objectively spin. It's fine, especially because it's so transparent, but it only takes reading 4 words to know the position of the article on the situation.

coldtea•21m ago

I find that the word guzzle is dead accurate.

They consume a huge amount of the country's electricity not only for no clear benefit to society, but mostly for making it worse, with more social media posts, stupid videos, surveillance, advertising-led consumption, ai slop

As compared to productive uses, like lighting, food preservation, home warming, medical use, transport, and useful manufacturing.

ralusek•37m ago

Guess if people who write articles like LLMs

toomuchtodo•36m ago

"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)

trollbridge•21m ago

Yeah, but Ireland has a looser regulatory environment where it’s easier for a data centre operator to buy off the relevant government regulators.

alephnerd•18m ago

> data centers do not belong in Ireland...

Data Centers have been the cornerstone of Ireland's economy since the 2006 when the IDA specifically began wooing tech FDI.

Also, if Europeans actually wish to have a sovereign tech industry, they need compute capacity.

zzgo•27m ago

Is The Register known for objectively reporting facts? If so, I have fundamentally misunderstood it for a quarter century.

JumpCrisscross•14m ago

> objectively reporting facts?

I believe so. They're not known for neutrally reporting them, which is different.

alephnerd•11m ago

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.

coldtea•24m ago

>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.

fabian2k•22m ago

Journalism is allowed to have an opinion, that doesn't make it propaganda.

illwrks•32m ago

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

alephnerd•26m ago

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.

alephnerd•30m ago

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 housing crisis and become the tech hub it is today.

[0] - https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/hyperscalers/microsoft-p...

matttttttttttt•25m ago

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

pizzafeelsright•13m ago

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

JumpCrisscross•5m ago

What fraction of Irish GDP is linked to datacenters? At least in the pre-AI world, that was one of Dublin's industrial strategies.

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