Canary in the data mine: Irish data centre activism amid planetary flows, frictions and antagonism

Abstract

This article analyses the landscape of data centre activism in Ireland by situating it within the recent history of the country’s intensive expansion of digital infrastructure. In 2024, data centres consumed 22% of Ireland’s electricity, making the country a significant outlier in the disproportionate impacts of big tech’s infrastructural expansion. As a result, since the mid-2010s, data centres have heavily influenced both climate activism and energy policy in the country, which has mobilised antagonism and facilitation at the civil society and state levels respectively. The interface between these two areas of action, however, remains out of step, due to local political factors as well as a growing need to recognise the broader justice implications of data centre expansion in Ireland, as elsewhere. Drawing from critical data centre studies and a scholar-activist methodological orientation, this article proposes two conceptual challenges: (1) to move beyond a simplifying impulse to make visible the environmental ‘impacts’ of the industry, due to the industry’s centrality in sustainability discourses and policies through the ‘twin transition’; and (2) to re-centre ‘antagonism’ as a structuring characteristic of our critical orientation against the unjust expansion of big tech’s infrastructure.