• This claim is supported by evidence. Official data indicates that data centres accounted for 23% of all metered electricity usage in Ireland in 2025. 
  • Total metered electricity usage from data centres rose from 1,240 GWh in 2015 to 7,663 GWh last year, an increase of 518%.
  • Recent research by Friends of the Earth links that the growth in data centres to increased electricity prices for households and other consumers in RoI. Due to the nature of the Single Electricity Market, this could also mean that Northern Irish consumers have seen electricity prices rise because of southern data centres.
  • There are some caveats to these figures, including that there is no generally agreed definition of “data centre”, although most of the total electricity usage from data centres is attributable to a small number of such centres.
  • Based on the best publicly-available data, Ireland appears to be an outlier in terms of the proportion of its metered electricity usage that comes from data centres – which may be the highest worldwide.

On 7 July, the Irish Times published an article with a headline claiming:

“Data centres account for almost a quarter of Irish electricity usage in 2025”

On 13 July, similar stories appeared in online magazine Computing and on TechRadar. Computing claimed that:

“Ireland’s datacentres now consume nearly a quarter of nation’s electricity”

While TechRadar noted:

“Ireland’s data center electricity consumption rises 360% in ten years, and is set to account for as much power as every home combined — 23% of national power sent to servers despite moratorium on new data center grid connections”

On 22 July, another similar claim appeared in the Business Post:

“Data centres accounted for nearly a quarter of Ireland’s electricity usage in 2025”

The claim that almost a quarter of Ireland’s energy usage comes from data centres is supported by evidence.

Recent official data from Ireland’s Central Statistics Office (CSO) indicates that 23% of the country’s metered electricity usage in 2025 was attributable to data centres – up from 5% in 2015.

The total energy used by data centres has gone from 1,240 Gigawatt hours (GWh) in 2015 to 7,663 GWh last year, an increase of 518%.

Based on the best publicly-available comparisons that FactCheckNI could find, Ireland is potentially the country with the highest proportion of metered electricity usage stemming from data centres.

The figures above only relate to metered electricity consumption and take no account of unmetered usage, which will generally be a factor in places that generate an amount of their own electricity – such as via solar panels or wind turbines.

Various research indicates that data centre proliferation can lead to other consumers in the same electricity market paying higher prices due to increased demand. In particular, recent research commissioned by Friends of the Earth indicates that the growth in data centres in Ireland has pushed up prices south of the border.

However, because NI and RoI operate within the Single Electricity Market, there is reason to believe the same effects have been felt up here – meaning Northern Irish consumers have seen electricity prices go up based on the proliferation of southern data centres.

There are some caveats to these figures. There is no generally agreed definition of a data centre and data centres do not have to register themselves as some special consumer of grid electricity. Instead, the CSO uses various approaches to try and identify which of its consumers are data centres.

However, this does not mean the central figures are likely to be significantly wrong. A majority of data centre electricity usage stems from a small number of easily-identifiable data centres. 

Some of the world’s largest technology companies have their European headquarters in Ireland, and the country hosts cloud infrastructure for tech giants including Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta.

Based on the best publicly-available information that FactCheckNI could locate, Ireland is a significant outlier in terms of the proportion of its energy usage that comes from data centres – which could be the highest of any nation worldwide.

For more information, read on.

  • Source

All these articles based their information on the Data Centres Metered Electricity Consumption 2025 report, released by the Irish Central Statistics Office (CSO) on 7 July 2026.

  • Findings

The main results from the CSO report are summed up in an infographic:

Figure 1 – source: CSO

As is clear from the figures produced, in 2025 datacentres consumed 23% of total metered electricity in Ireland. This supports the claim.

However, context is important. The idea that datacentres consume so much energy is striking – but is it unusual compared with other nations? Is the growth from 5% in 2015 to 23% in 2025 so staggering? Let’s take a look.

  • How much do datacentres draw from the Irish grid?

The CSO began annually publishing Data Centres Metered Electricity Consumption reports in 2020.

However, the analysis within those reports extends further back in time. Using meter data received from the Electricity Supply Board (ESB Networks), the CSO’s most recent analysis shows that 23% of metered electricity consumed by data centres, up from 5% a decade ago.

Between 2015 and 2025 there has been a 518% increase – that’s not a typo, over five hundred percent – in the metered power consumption of Irish datacenters: from 1,240 Gigawatt hours to 7,663 GWh.

Over the same period, the consumption of all other (non-data centre) energy users has risen 8.4% – from 23,360 GWh to 25,324 GWh.

The annual increase of metered consumption by data centres was typically 20% or more until a down-turn in recent years (dropping to 10% annual increases), which corresponds to a de facto moratorium on new grid connections for data centers in Dublin (explained below).

Figure 2 – source: redrawn from CSO data

Note that some of the headlines (TechRadar) and articles (Computing) claim that there has been a 360% increase in data centre electricity consumption over ten years. The journalists’ calculations are based on data centres’ proportion (the slice of the pie) of the total consumption rising from 5% to 23% – an increase of 18 percentage points (pp).

However, the overall consumption (the size of the pie) has also risen, so a 18pp rise should not be translated into or summarised as a 360% rise. That’s bad maths, and using the figures for Gigawatt hours, the surge in consumption is even larger and, as explained further up in this article, is an even more eye watering 518%. 

  • Consumer prices

Research from elsewhere around the world indicates that the increased demand for electricity from data centres has the potential to drive up prices for consumers (see here, here, here and here).

In particular, a report from Friends of the Earth (FoE), published in May, found that the proliferation of data centres has driven up consumer prices south of the border. 

According to FoE an average household in Ireland “may have paid an additional €360 in electricity bills between 2015 and 2023” due to data centres and “depending on the future scale of data centre expansion, they’re looking at paying between €295 and €644 extra on electricity bills between 2025 and 2034.”

The local electricity system is part of the all-island Single Electricity Market (SEM), operated by SONI (System Operator for Northern Ireland) and Eirgrid. In the SEM, electricity is traded and dispatched across Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland as a single wholesale market.

FactCheckNI asked the Department for the Economy (DfE), Department of Finance DoF), Utility Regulator and SONI if the rise in data centre energy consumption south of the border has had, or could possibly have, an effect on consumer electricity prices in NI? 

DfE and DoF both notified us that the Utility Regulator would provide a response. That response stated (bold added by FactCheckNI): 

“The wholesale price of electricity on the island of Ireland is determined within the Single Electricity Market (SEM), which operates across both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. As a result, changes in electricity demand in either jurisdiction can influence wholesale market outcomes.

“However, electricity price formation in the SEM is influenced by a wide range of factors. These include overall levels of electricity demand, international fuel prices (particularly gas prices), the availability of generation plant, interconnector flows, carbon prices, and prevailing meteorological conditions that affect renewable generation output, especially wind generation.

“In this context, increases in demand from any source, including the growth in electricity consumption by data centres in the Republic of Ireland, can place upward or downward pressure on wholesale electricity prices. Higher demand generally requires more generation to be dispatched, which may result in higher-cost generation units setting the market price more frequently. However, higher demand can alternatively mean that more renewable electricity can be used.

“That said, it is important to recognise that demand is only one of a number of factors affecting wholesale prices. For example, periods of strong wind generation can reduce wholesale prices, while increases in international gas prices can have a significant upward effect on market outcomes. These factors often interact simultaneously, and their relative influence can vary considerably over time.

“For this reason, it is challenging to isolate and quantify the specific contribution of any single factor, such as data centre demand, to wholesale electricity prices over a given period.”

As laid out by the Utility Regulator, there are many factors influencing local consumer electricity prices. However, the research commissioned by Friends of the Earth and the Utility Regulator’s explanation of how the all-island market works suggest that it’s quite possible that consumers in NI will have paid out more based on the growth of southern data centres. 

Confirming whether this is the case – and, if so, just how much more local consumers have been paying due to these data centres – requires more research.

SONI has indicated it will provide us with a response but, at the time of writing, this has not been received.

  • Identifying Irish data centres

What is a data centre? This is a surprisingly complicated question. The CSO bulletin notes that there is no agreed definition of a data centre.

The six annual reports suggest that, over the years, the CSO have refined their process of identifying data centres in Ireland. Consumption figures in older reports have been updated to reflect the year-on-year improvements in identification and categorisation, so comparisons between different years remain valid. According to CSO:

“As data centres are not separately classified in the source data [meter data received from the Electricity Supply Board], the CSO uses various approaches to identify them including name searches for known data centre operators, information from industry reports and internet searches, and examination of high consumption customers to determine the business sector they are in.”

Do two computer services sitting in a cupboard count as a small data centre? No.

CSO appears to be looking for sizeable clusters of computing capacity. Its report notes that data centres are not readily identifiable in the meter data. There are approximately 2.6 million electricity meters in Ireland, each with a unique MPRN (Meter Point Reference Number) and the CSO report notes a broad range of factors it considers in identifying data centre connections among these individual meters.

However, this does not mean that the headline figures are at risk of being wildly wrong. CSO states that overall “a small number of data centres accounted for most of the metered electricity consumption by data centres”.

Some of the world’s largest technology companies have their European headquarters in Ireland, and the country hosts cloud infrastructure for tech giants including Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta.

  • Is all electricity consumption metered?

No. Any location that has its own renewable electricity source, like solar panels or wind turbines, will generally connect ‘behind the meter’ and that electricity will be used before drawing on the metered power grid.


The statistics quoted in this claim are the proportion of metered electricity consumption, energy supplied on the power grid. However, some data centres also will be consuming their own privately-generated unmetered electricity.

A three-year de facto moratorium on new grid connections for data centers in Dublin (put in place due to grid capacity constraints) was recently lifted. However, data centres seeking more than 10 MVA of new capacity must now provide, or buy in from private suppliers, their own onsite generation or storage.

This allows companies to set up their own energy infrastructure (solar, wind or storage) separate from the national grid. For example, Google plan to buy in renewable electricity from the private Tullabeg Solar Farm in County Wexford.

  • Is Ireland an outlier?

In short, yes.

During a House of Lords debate about internet energy usage (in particular, cryptocurrencies) in January 2025, the then Minister of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, said:

“[The] National Energy System Operator [NESO] has estimated that data centres consume around 2.5% of the UK’s electricity. The UK is not a major centre for cryptocurrency mining. We estimate the share of power consumed in the UK for this purpose to be negligible…”

“[My] understanding is that NESO has estimated that 7 terawatt hours will be used by data centres in 2025, rising to 22 terawatt hours in 2030 and to 62 terawatt hours in 2050. As a comparison, it expects annual electricity demand in 2050 to be between 533 and 700 terawatt hours.”

NESO’s figures are for Great Britain only but Northern Ireland doesn’t have very many major data centres so the figures for the whole UK won’t be very different. They predict that data centres in GB will triple their electricity consumption in five years, and rise from 2.5% of consumption to around 10% by 2050. Still well under Irish levels.

Further details can be found in a House of Commons Library report on data centres in May 2026 that highlights energy usage as well as water usage and regional planning policies.

FactCheckNI could not find any single organisation that publishes free and easy-to-compare global statistics on data centre energy use. (However, if you know of any such source please get in touch.)

Perhaps this reflects the definitional problems of agreeing standards on what counts as a data centre, and how to tag electricity usage (meter readings) for buildings operating data centres.

However, there are a number of reports that provide useful insights.

The recently-published Global Data Centre Report 2026 by the International Data Center Authority think tank ranks Ireland as number one in terms of data centre national grid energy consumption (21%, a 2023 statistic), followed by Singapore (19.5%) and Lithuania (11.1%).

Figure 3 – source: IDCA

A note of caution: the full data listing all the countries analysed isn’t available to download so we can’t check how wide the underlying research extends, nor see if what is being measured is truly comparable.

Globally, the IDCA report estimates that “data centers now consume 2 percent of the world’s electricity, up from 1.7 percent in 2024 and 1.9 percent in mid-year 2025”. The IDCA contradicts the former Minister of State for Energy Security and says that data centres consume 5.8% of the UK’s electricity. 

Older modelling (April 2025) by the International Energy Agency’s Energy and AI report estimates that “globally, data centre electricity consumption has grown by around 12% per year since 2017”. The chart earlier in this article shows that Ireland has significantly outpaced that global average growth in all but the last two years.

The Data Centres: Hungry for Power report published by ICIS (Independent Commodity Intelligence Services) in November 2024 also uses statistics that are now slightly out of date but still offers a useful moment-in-time comparison across European countries. 

Using data likely to be from 2023, ICIS finds that in terms of the proportion of national electricity consumed by data centres, Ireland leads Europe, and confirms that Netherlands is the next largest consumer (2.5 times less than Ireland, broadly in line with the IDCA report above).

Figure 4 – source: ICIS

For context, the population of the Netherlands is approximately four times the size of Ireland. The ICIS report suggests that while the city of Amsterdam has roughly the same number of data centres as Dublin, overall the Netherlands has approximately four times the number of data centres of Ireland.

The stark difference in the proportion of power demand suggests that Ireland either has larger, more densely-populated/electrically-hungry data centres and/or fewer other heavy energy-consuming industries competing for available power.

The ICIS report notes that Germany, UK, France and Netherlands each have more than four times the number of data centres than Ireland. Data centres tend to be concentrated in urban areas (with fast links to the internet) and ICIS finds that London, Frankfurt, Paris and Amsterdam (the so-called LFAP cities) host between 30-45% of their country’s data centres, while the next largest city, Dublin (now part of LFAP-D), hosts 97% of all Irish data centres.