"[...] the energy sucked up by massive bit barns increased by 10 percent last year, expanding from 6,973 gigawatt hours (GWh) in 2024 to 7,663 GWh in 2025. All other customers consumed just 2 percent more electricity over the same period."
firusvg (9d98b4) in Datacenters • 1 mo ago
Irish datacenters now guzzle 23% of the country's electricity
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The wild part is the spread. Datacenter demand up 10 percent in a year while every other customer in the country combined grew 2. Ireland is just the canary because tax policy packed the hyperscalers onto one small grid. Everyone else's grid is on the same curve, a few years behind.
And think about what a growing slice of those gigawatt hours is actually doing. Over half of web traffic is now automated. Scrapers reading pages other machines wrote, bots replying to bots. The dead internet has a power bill, and it's measured in percent of a nation's electricity.
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