{"id":634627,"date":"2026-09-24T14:58:33","date_gmt":"2026-09-24T14:58:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/634627\/"},"modified":"2026-09-24T14:58:33","modified_gmt":"2026-09-24T14:58:33","slug":"economic-benefits-of-data-centres-have-been-exaggerated-report-claims","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/634627\/","title":{"rendered":"Economic benefits of data centres have been &#8216;exaggerated&#8217;, report claims"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\n            The economic benefits of data centres to Ireland have been \u201cexaggerated\u201d and centre on \u201cflawed methodology\u201d based on activity that pre-dates their construction, a report claims.<\/p>\n<p>                How We All Pay for Big Tech \u2013 the social, economic and environmental costs of data centres in Ireland,also claims data centres cannot be compared to other industrial sectors like the motor industry, given the disparity in the number of jobs provided by both.<\/p>\n<p class=\"\">\n            It argues that the total value to the Irish economy of high-tech construction, including the construction of data centres, amounts to just 1% of the value of exports via computer services performed on behalf of the foreign tech multinationals based here.\u00a0\n        <\/p>\n<p class=\"\">\n            This\u00a0suggests the overall economic impact of building data centres here is negligible.<\/p>\n<p class=\"\">\n            The report\u2019s authors, including academics Patrick Bresnihan and Patrick Brodie of NUI Maynooth and University College Dublin respectively, argue that Ireland\u2019s 129 data centres\u00a0\u2014 despite sustaining just 3,300 permanent jobs \u2014 utilise 23% of Ireland\u2019s power output and used 254.7bn litres of water over a 10-year period.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"\">This is equivalent to 340,600 homes or about a fifth of the occupied dwellings in Ireland, while 50,000 additional homes could have been built in the five years to 2024 \u201cwith the capital invested in data centres\u201d.<\/p>\n<p class=\"contextmenu caption\">Government criticism<\/p>\n<p class=\"\">\n            The Government was criticised last month when it emerged that the Department of Enterprise had sought changes to a <a target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" href=\"&lt;\/span&gt;https:\/\/www.irishexaminer.com\/news\/arid-41854596.html\">draft report compiled by consultants KPMG<\/a> in order to present \u201ca strong narrative\u201d in terms of the data centre industry in the State.<\/p>\n<p class=\"\">\n            The changes made to that report included updates in terms of how concerns in the community over the amount of power and water used by the centres should be dealt with by the Government, while the report itself claimed that centres had added \u20ac100bn in value and 875,000 jobs to the Irish economy.<\/p>\n<p class=\"\">\n            However, the newly-released academic report argues the claims made in the KPMG report of outsize economic activity being delivered by data centres \u201cdo not hold up to any scrutiny\u201d.<\/p>\n<p class=\"\">\n            It claims the Government\u2019s report used \u201cspurious methodology\u201d in ascribing the economic activity of \u201c30 huge private enterprises\u201d to data centres, given the economic impacts \u201care themselves unverifiable given the nature of cloud computing\u201d.<\/p>\n<p class=\"\">\n            The report states: \u201cInstead of a credible analysis of direct and real economic activity that may be linked to data centres, the Government has sought to create a myth of \u2018domestic dependency\u2019 of huge sections of pre-existing economic activity in Ireland to hyperscale data centres.&#8221;\n        <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The economic benefits of data centres to Ireland have been \u201cexaggerated\u201d and centre on \u201cflawed methodology\u201d based on&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":634628,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[72,1111,113,61,60,43,1112],"class_list":["post-634627","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-court-and-crime","tag-economy","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-news","tag-politics-and-analysis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/634627","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=634627"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/634627\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/634628"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=634627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=634627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=634627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}