Fershad Irani

Digital Sustainability Consultant
This website is grid-aware, some functionality has changed based on your local energy grid. Find out more.
Note

Data center electricity usage in Ireland matches urban residential

Published:

Table of Contents

This is wild. Data from Ireland shows that the electricity consumption of data centers in 2022 was the same as all the energy used by urban dwellings in the country.

Data Centres Metered Electricity Consumption 2022: % of metered electricity consumed by data centres, 5% in 2015, 14% in 2021, 18% in 2022; % of metered electricity consumed by urban dwellings, 21% in 2021, 18% in 2022; % of metered electricity consumed by rural dwellings, 12% in 2021, 10% in 2022

The infographic above comes from the Central Statistics Office of Ireland (CSO).

It's unbelievable to see the increase in electricity consumption for data centers over time. A 31% increase from 2021 to 2022, and a 400% increase from 2015 to 2022. That's not sustainable growth, and it kind of makes me question what we hear about improvements in the efficiency of data center hardware.

I hope the CSO keep publishing this data yearly. It'll be very interesting to see how it trends, especially with data for 2023 that would capture the LLM, AI, ChatGPT boom.