CW+ Premium Content/Computer Weekly

Dublin in Ireland has benefited from enviable amounts of overseas tech investment over the past decade that has served to transform it into one of Europe’s largest hyperscale datacentre hubs. And with no signs of a slowdown in demand for datacentre capacity, concerns are mounting about whether Dublin and the surrounding area has the electricity infrastructure needed to serve the needs of the growing number of power-hungry server farms springing up there. The matter has been the subject of separate consultations by Ireland’s national grid operator and the country’s energy regulator in recent months, while opposition party politicians introduced a bill in June 2021 designed to slow the pace of datacentre developments in Dublin on energy security grounds. According to the most recently published data from real estate consultancy giant CBRE, some 139MW of colocation capacity has been leased in Dublin to date, and a further 476MW of supply has been snaffled up by the hyperscale cloud and internet giants. Combined, these figures mean ...