Over the past decade, Dublin has emerged as a global tech hub, playing a role in the data centre boom. Data centres have come to the fore in recent years as major tech companies expand them to meet demand for AI and cloud computing. Here are the factors that led to Dublin becoming home to so many of these server rooms.
How Data Centres Work
Data centres have been a crucial internet infrastructure since the ‘80s, but over time, they’ve become increasingly relevant to our everyday lives. Today, we use hyperscale data centres to support cloud computing and cache online data all over the world, creating content delivery networks (CDNs) that reduce loading speeds since you’re always pulling data from a server near you.
These data centres also enabled new types of content online. Livestreamed content would be difficult without them, because the latency would be too high. CDNs made it easier to offer streams in different qualities, cut down lag and spread traffic, so servers don’t get overloaded. The result was the ability to stream yourself on popular social media sites, while existing applications became dramatically easier to set up. Take the live casino as an example, where dealers can host blackjack, roulette and other games on camera, and broadcast it fast enough that the audience can select betting options and play despite not being in the room. This tech was first cracked in the mid-2000s, but it took until the 2010s for it to spread, thanks to CDNs, 5G and other supporting technologies.
For many people, they first heard of data centres in 2023 after generative AI took off, but they’ve been shaping the internet long before that. When the AI boom started, we saw another huge spike in data centre adoption and expansion, the last one being during the dot-com bubble. This expansion is driven by the need for a lot of storage because large language models (LLMs) require a lot of training data and get bigger and bigger as they learn.
Why Dublin Attracts Data Centres
The Greater Dublin Area is one of the most densely packed regions when it comes to data centres, especially relative to its population. It’s only beaten by Data Center Alley in Virginia, USA and Beijing in China. To answer why Dublin is so attractive, we have to ask why the hyperscalers are there in the first place.
Hyperscalers are those giant tech companies that have a vested interest in building and maintaining the data centres that keep the internet going. Those would be Google, Microsoft, Amazon (through AWS) and Meta. These companies all positioned their European headquarters in Ireland long before the new data centre boom, thanks to our favourable corporate tax rate and other pro-business incentives.
Coincidentally, they put down roots in a place that had other benefits that would become relevant later. Ireland serves as a convenient bridge between the US and Europe, especially when you consider that many of the internet’s massive subsea cables connect to Ireland before crossing the Atlantic.
Even more fortuitous is that Ireland has a cold climate, which turned out to be ideal for data centres. These massive server rooms rely on cooling to run efficiently, so Dublin data centres have been built with systems that draw air in from the outside, lowering demand for very costly artificial cooling. This wouldn’t be possible if the data centre were in a climate with hot, dry air.
As a result, a confluence of financial, geographical and environmental factors led to Ireland becoming the natural home for these big tech companies and their data centres. As our capital and biggest city, Dublin became the first port of call for hyperscalers looking to build bigger, better server rooms without overspending on cooling energy.
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