The data scientists aren’t the ones working in the data centres. There’s no real advantage to having the data they’re working on next door unless it’s extremely lag sensitive.
Local proximity of a datacentre is good for fintech, Netflix and gaming servers.
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-...
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...
I'm sure they work up a sweat but probably not on the same order of magnitude
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 is the alternative? I don't think self hosting is a robust/defensible option for a majority of internet services
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.
Yes, datacenters are critical internet infrastructure. But in Ireland they're more like a sailing ship with the sails mounted underwater, because that's cheaper for tax reasons.
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.
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.
thegrim33•1h ago
ralusek•1h ago
toomuchtodo•1h ago
(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•1h ago
alephnerd•1h ago
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...
zzgo•1h ago
JumpCrisscross•1h ago
I believe so. They're not known for neutrally reporting them, which is different.
antonvs•46m ago
I don't have any problem with The Register, but reporting laden with value-judging adjectives is not objective.
alephnerd•58m ago
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•1h ago
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.
fc417fc802•20m ago
beepbooptheory•14m ago
fabian2k•1h ago
peab•10m ago