Memory Machines: Data Centers in Ireland
Jessica Traynor · New hibernia review · 2023
Memory Machines:Data Centers in Ireland Jessica Traynor (bio) "Memory Machines" was first commissioned by The Dial and appeared in issue 13. TheDial.world in the doldrum days between Christmas and New Year's, we take a family trip to see a data center. Over the past two decades, data centers have become a common sight around the outskirts of Dublin and many other Irish cities and towns. Situated in industrial business parks, they are easy to miss. But these buildings are critical to the maintenance of contemporary life: inside their walls stand rows and rows of networked servers; inside the servers, terabytes of data flow. It's a seven-minute drive from where we live in Artane, Dublin, to the Clonshaugh data center, located in a business park behind Northside Shopping Centre. Although we live close by, we haven't driven this way before, and our route takes us through a number of the local authority estates that my husband lived in as a boy. These estates are set on either side of a long, straight road pocked with chicanes to deter joyriders. Even though the housing development sprawls for miles on either side—with large, wind-blasted green spaces in between—the houses huddle, squashed together. It looks as if someone had transplanted a warren of inner-city Victorian terraces to this desolate terrain. My eldest daughter, who is six, sits in her car seat behind us and draws her impression of what a data center might look like. She shows it to me. It's a large square, subdivided into many smaller squares. In the middle of each of the smaller squares swims a small tadpole-like dot. The effect is unsettling. "No windows?" I ask. She considers for a moment. "Mummy, this is the back of the building. The back bits don't have windows." When Google Maps tells us we have arrived at our destination, we swing off the main road and into a newer cul-de-sac and park the car. To our right, small houses, their Christmas decor forlorn in the brownish-gray light of an [End Page 5] Irish winter's afternoon. To our left, the industrial park's security-spiked fence, lining Clonshaugh Road as far as the eye can see. In 2023, the consulting company Bitpower put the number of data centers in Ireland at eighty-two.1 Ireland's Central Statistics Office reported in 2021 that these centers were using up to 18 percent of the country's metered electricity, the same amount as every Irish household combined.2 The data center we're visiting, situated in the midst of some of Dublin's most impoverished council estates, was only the third to be built in Ireland. At 11,500 square meters (about 124,000 square feet), the Clonshaugh data center is small compared with the one Facebook opened in 2018 in Clonee, County Meath, which is about 150,000 square meters (about 1.6 million square feet). A 2008 Irish Times article on the building of the Clonshaugh data center is optimistic in tone, quoting Cathal Magee, Eircom's manager director of retail: "Customers get the ideal environment for their critical systems, as well as access to high-value technical specialists who are skilled at managing the hardware and software that businesses require."3 The Clonshaugh data center was developed by Digital Realty Trust and is operated by Eir—the company that evolved from the state-run Department of Posts and Telegraphs to first become Telecom Éireann, then the privately owned Eircom, via a disastrous flotation and shares scandal in the late 1990s. In January 2008, when Eir invested 100 million euro in the Clonshaugh data center, Ireland was only months away from becoming the first country in the eurozone to enter a recession. Yet the data centers survived the downturn, heralds of a new economy that promised to one day move the nation away from the banking and housing bubble that had left it bankrupt. Data centers were one part of a long-standing vision of Ireland as a tech hub, a place where multinationals like Google, Facebook, and Amazon would base their European headquarters, attracted by...