[pizzafeelsright]

That is about 3% of California's total energy usage

Or about 11,000 GWh which is about 4% of California which means without the theatrics:

California has 4x more data centers than Ireland.

California: ~810 watts per person. (278,000 GWh / 39.4 million people)

Ireland: ~690 watts per person. (32,000 GWh / 5.3 million people)

We have air conditioning and that may be why we use more POWAH

[JumpCrisscross]

What fraction of Irish GDP is linked to datacenters? If I remember correctly from the pre-AI world, datacenters were at the heart of Dublin's industrial strategy, and they were credibly linked to a double-digit fraction of production.

[stuaxo]

Irelands big pull to these companies is to not tax them as much as other countries.

[dboreham]

That said, once built and lit up, it's hard to move a data center to another country.

[jamesfinlayson]

Yep, seen a data-centre move happen at work (from a distance - I wasn't effected). For a business with cross-data centre redundancy and no allowable down-time for core business, it was at least a year-long project I think. All for a data-centre in the same city.

[dilyevsky]

A year isnt very long considering sums involved here. At a certain hyperscaler a full dc build out took 2-3 years but we heard that aws did that in a year all in. And also musk proved you can do it literally over holiday break but you don’t have to go that extreme - just dont let cya pmcs do it

[dilyevsky]

Like 90%+ cost of a dc is actual computers which are pretty shippable

[henry2023]

Even in the hypothetical that datacenters would double Ireland’s GDP what real positive impact would it have if they pay zero taxes?

[a_paddy]

They do pay tax, 12.5%. Plus employment during construction and maintenance. There's also ancillary investment in national infrastructure such as Google's CO2 battery

[hunterpayne]

The rest of Europe sued Ireland to get them to stop being a tax haven. Ireland basically refuses to do so. If they did, most of their economy evaporates overnight (and the US government gets a lot more tax revenue). Ireland's economy is basically 2 tax shelters in a trench coat.

[phs318u]

Did you mean hypothesis?

[henry2023]

I meant hypothetical, thanks for pointing it out.

[hinkley]

I'm actually quite surprised that California only has 4x as many data centers, with CA having more than 7x the population (not to mention being pivotal in the Information Age)

[paleotrope]

California is not a great place to build data centers. If you need to service CA, there are better options

[hinkley]

Oh yeah, power distribution is kind of a circus there isn't it.

[tims33]

Power, land, water, people - all expensive in CA.

[gretch]

Also earthquakes