IDA Ireland Irish Development Agency (IDA) has announced that looking ahead, it is “unlikely” that any new data centres will be built in Dublin or along the east coast. However, Martin Shanahan, the head of the state’s development agency, has said it will build data centers if they are required by tech companies.
He outlined: “Data centres are a component of the technology sector and we have benefited hugely from the technology sector. Data… is going to be at the centre of just about everything that we are going to need to do from an enterprise perspective.”
Adding “Cloud computing, AI [artificial intelligence], the processing of big data, is all part of IDA’s strategy because that is where the world is going. That is where enterprises are going. That is where valuable jobs will be going. And data centres will be key to underpinning that. And where companies need data centre solutions, we will engage with those.”
Shanahan also said that going forward, data centers will help to generate a “stable energy demand” offshore wind farms in the future. “Offshore wind should become a reality and my expectation is it will, and there are significant amounts of it required, and [it] will require a stable demand and data centres provide that stable demand," he said.
