“How we all pay for Big Tech: The social, economic, and environmental costs of data centres” in Ireland, Fearon, Bresnihan and Brodie

24.09.2026. A new academic report published today – ‘How we all pay for Big Tech: The social, economic, and environmental costs of data centres in Ireland’ – has found that data centres in Ireland impose significant costs on Irish society, whilst the benefits of expanding data centre development for local economies are exaggerated.

The publication, written by academics Seán Fearon (Autonomous University of Barcelona), Patrick Bresnihan (Maynooth University), and Patrick Brodie (University College Dublin), presents new evidence and arguments for the direct, indirect, and opportunity costs of uninhibited data centre development in Ireland.

The report comes amid increased opposition from local communities, civil society, and political parties in Ireland to Government plans to expand support for data centres, as part of a strategy to accommodate and compete in the “AI race.”

The report authors said: “Our report demonstrates that data centres impose a wide range of costs on society, while allowing tech giants to accumulate significant amounts of wealth, power, and control over energy and resources.”

“Government and industry have exaggerated claims about the economic benefits of data centres, based on untenable connections between data centres and real economic activity in Ireland. Our report presents evidence to dispel these claims.”

“Rather than being an economic opportunity, the continued expansion of data centres represents an irrational allocation of resources across the Irish economy, prioritising the needs of big tech over Irish society during a cost of living crisis and a time of escalating ecological emergency.”

“Data centres provide little direct employment and cannot be compared to industrial sectors across Europe simply because they consume vast amounts of energy. The jobs they do provide are more emissions and energy intensive than jobs across the economy by orders of magnitude. For example, we find a full time job in a data centre is 880 times more CO2 intensive than a job in the health service, 590 times more than a job in education, and 400 times more than employment in the retail sector.”

“At the same time, the resources committed to data centre development directs essential economic capacity away from meeting urgent social need. Our report finds that if the capital committed to data centres primarily owned by US tech giants was instead devoted to home building, some 50,000 houses could have been built in Ireland between 2019-2024.”

“Our research presents evidence and arguments for a moratorium on the further expansion of data centres in Ireland. We are already a global outlier, with 23% of our electricity going to data centres. Opposition to uncritical expansion of data centres is growing, here and across the world. Economic development in Ireland should focus on meeting social and ecological need as a priority, rather than the needs of tech giants.”

The full paper can be read here.