Sometimes an issue rises so suddenly up the political agenda that it startles everyone at first, only for it to look inevitable in hindsight. That has been the story of recent months in the United States, where politicians in both parties have scrambled to respond to swelling public anger at the rapid proliferation of data centres.
Opposition to the huge, windowless facilities that provide the computing power required by artificial intelligence has now become one of the rare issues uniting voters across the partisan divide.
The frustrations feeding the backlash are varied but clear. Households blame the giant server farms for soaring electricity bills. Communities resent the water use, the noise, the land taken and the generous tax breaks handed to some of the wealthiest corporations on earth in return for remarkably few permanent jobs. Beneath it all runs a deeper unease about a technology many people regard with suspicion or fear, and a sense that ordinary citizens are being asked to carry the costs of a boom whose rewards are unlikely to benefit them.
In Europe the same pressures are mounting, but the response so far has been quieter and more technocratic. State and regulatory bodies have tried to manage the rollout through grid rules and planning conditions. That approach is now becoming fraught, and nowhere more so than in Ireland. The Republic leads the world in the share of its metered electricity consumed by data centres, almost a quarter last year and forecast to reach a third by the end of the decade.
The Department of Enterprise’s recently commissioned report, which sought to inflate the benefits and play down the costs, only drew attention to the flimsiness of the case and to its real driver, namely Ireland’s deep dependence on American tech companies and its consequent eagerness to do their bidding.
Every factor stoking American anger is present here, save one: an imminent election. A report this week from the energy regulator, offering new data centres cut-price gas in return for accepting interruptions to their supply during severe weather, showed how far the State will still bend to accommodate them. But Sinn Féin’s call for a moratorium is significant. Only months ago such demands in the US were confined to the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democrats. Now they are heard right across the spectrum.
The combustible elements here are unmistakable, with high consumer energy prices, a grid already short of what security of supply demands, missed renewable targets, and a headlong rush to expand consumption for a technology people distrust. If the Government parties wish to avoid a painful reckoning at the polls, a radical rethink of both policy and message is required.