When 80% of data center power eventually comes from renewables, Leonard said, that’s a lot of renewable energy going towards fueling AI. Ireland's Climate Change Advisory Council has warned that data centers are “cannibalising any increase in Irish renewable capacity.”

“What happens in terms of the existing industries and sectors that need to decarbonize?” Leonard asked. “You're giving one industry permission to expand at a very significant rate, saying it’s no problem because you need to build renewables, but that actually will reduce the share of renewables on the system as a whole.”

Economic trade offs

A recent report commissioned by the Irish government says data centers are “fundamental to Ireland’s position as a leading global hub for digital and technology-driven enterprise,” noting that jobs dependent on data centers bring in about €14.6 billion in annual employment-related taxes.

The report was criticized by Irish MEP Lynn Boylan from the left-wing Sinn Féin party for omitting findings on how data center expansion could drive up people's electricity bills.

Standing outside the Amazon data center in Tallaght, David McManus, a local councilor in South Dublin from Fine Gael, the center-right party currently in coalition government, said data centers are part of the deal that comes with Big Tech.

“This is part and parcel of what Amazon, Google, Microsoft see as being essential to their operations,” he said. "You can't just turn around to these high-tech companies and say, yes, we want the high-paid engineers, and lots of people employed, but we don't want the data centers that back it all up."