Back in March a government-commissioned KMPG report on Irish data centres contained a section called ‘study boundaries’. Sounds boring but tucked inside is a line noting that the analysis “excludes consideration of national security and digital sovereignty risks, including risks arising from foreign ownership or control of data centre assets”.
Roll on six months later and a big hoo-hah was made about the Dublin Declaration on Trustworthy, Safe and Sovereign Artificial Intelligence launched at The International AI Summit held in the RDS this past Wednesday where sovereignty got a section of its very own.
Signatories have pledged to “reduce critical dependencies” and to help European organisations “retain effective control over their data, knowledge assets and AI-enabled capabilities”.
What the declaration never does is actually define sovereignty, or say who, exactly, Europe depends on. Cough, the US, cough. Nor does it explain why Italy and Spain are missing from the signature pages. That is convenient for the host, because in Ireland the first question has a very short answer.
That KPMG report for the Department of Enterprise, Tourism and Employment counted 72 operational data centre buildings in the state, with 1,543MW of installed IT capacity. Some 88% of that capacity sits in ‘hyperscale’ facilities on just nine sites. When KPMG gives examples of who operates them, it names AWS, Meta, Google and Microsoft, all of which, as we know, are US Big Tech. Data centres consumed 23% of all metered electricity in Ireland last year, according to the CSO. In comparison, every home in the country combined used 28%. How’s your leccy bill these days?
And we are not done building data centres by a long shot: at the start of this year, AWS won permission for three more data centres at Cruiserath in north Dublin. The KPMG report counts 300mw of grid connections already contracted to 2030 and a further 1.4gw at various stages of development. It also cites EirGrid’s estimate of 5.8gw in additional demand out to 2040.
So what does sovereignty mean when under the US CLOUD Act, US authorities can compel American providers to hand over data in their possession or control, regardless of where it is stored. A server in north Dublin is no less within Washington’s reach for being in north Dublin.
Meanwhile, Europe’s own effort at sovereign AI and tech in general is largely happening elsewhere. The EU’s EuroHPC Joint Undertaking has placed its AI Factories, built around supercomputers, in Finland, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden and beyond. Ireland was selected for an ‘AI factory antenna’ designed to complement the services of the existing factories. A satellite dish, in other words, pointed at someone else’s sovereignty.
The Summit itself painted a neat portrait of the tension. Niamh Smyth, Minister of State for AI, signed the declaration on Ireland’s behalf. And then she introduced the morning’s keynote speaker: Microsoft president Brad Smith.
And look, none of this makes the hyperscalers villains because we’re not blind to the fact that they employ people and pay a fair amount of tax (and the waste heat from an AWS data centre warms TU Dublin’s Tallaght campus, which I’d love to see more of). Ireland made a rational bet and it has paid off handsomely so far. But you can’t pledge to reduce critical dependencies while marketing yourself as the most dependable place in Europe to depend on someone else. Talk about two-faced.
It feels to me that Ireland is saying it’s wholeheartedly in favour of European AI sovereignty while also laying out the red carpet for US Big Tech. It brings to mind a saying of my mother’s: run with the hare and hunt with the hounds.
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