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.

Introduction

The digital cloud has become a storm, raging through public and political discourse at lightning speed, sparked alight by the promises of the AI revolution. Once a frontrunner in the data centre arms race, Ireland now seeks to re-establish itself as a leader, no matter the environmental cost. In 2021, an emergency policy from the Commission for the Regulation of Utilities (CRU) was introduced following ‘amber alerts’ that sounded the alarm about unmitigated electricity consumption during Ireland’s hyperscale data centre boom (Commission for the Regulation of Utilities (CRU), 2021). The warnings were clear: it’s either more data centres or risk widespread blackouts across the country (Sargent, 2022). At the time, the CRU intervention cast a shadow on the future of this industry and the unmitigated growth that it had enjoyed. The government, licking its wounds, has now returned to the table with a newly proposed policy to spark life back into this industry (CRU, 2025). However, to facilitate this feat, sacrifices have to be made. Namely, this proposed policy aims to reduce grid-based constraints by prioritising fossil-fuel generation and ‘private wire’ connections (Mercier, 2023). In response, opposition parties invoked the climate concerns that have long plagued the industry; data centres are jeopardising Ireland’s legally-binding climate obligations to the point of crisis (Daly, 2024a). Unsurprisingly, the Taoiseach Micheál Martin lamented the opposition, while chastising their ‘demonisation’ of the ‘AI revolution’ and digital economy writ large (O’Halloran, 2025). Meanwhile, a staggering statistic made the headlines: 50% of electricity in County Dublin and Meath was now being used by data centres (O’Doherty, 2025a).

Since the mid-2010s, before most other territories had addressed the energy crunch driven by the electricity needs of large-scale cloud computing, Ireland has been facing a public discourse and contestation surrounding the role of data centres in the country’s economic and climate futures. The Government’s current approach has led to data centres consuming 22% of Ireland’s electricity in 2024 (CSO, 2025), a distinct outlier when compared to the EU-wide estimate of 1.8%–2.6% in 2022 (Kamiya and Bertoldi, 2024). ¹ Other European countries have taken significant steps to curb data centre growth at a fraction of the infrastructural strain experienced in Ireland (Judge, 2023; Rone, 2024). But, as political economists in Ireland have long pointed out (O’Boyle and Allen, 2021), these apparent contradictions of development and underinvestment are central to Ireland’s model of foreign direct investment (FDI)-led economic development, while providing the capital, infrastructure, and environmental systems required for their expansion (Bresnihan and Brodie, 2025).

At the same time, the current wave of data centre regulation (and resistance) has aimed to publicise data centres’ impacts. While these strategies highlight the material consequences of rapid data centre growth and address the lack of reliable information, they also risk inadvertently accepting the underlying premise that private data centre expansion is necessary to support economic and other societal goals. Therefore, in these discourses and strategies, data centres increasingly become a problem to be solved, often through arcane forms of calculation and techno-solutionism often relying on the ‘expertise’ of the very same companies that operate them. Strategies of visibility alone nominally contest data centres, while implicitly signalling, with the proper regulatory frameworks, that their growth can still continue within more careful guardrails, mobilised towards wider social targets of ‘sustainability’. Sustainability has numerous connotations; however, this article understands sustainability as a means to sustain a particular ideology of economic development in the interests of capital (Bonevac, 2010; Vaughan et al., 2023). This logic is firmly embedded in the ‘twin transitions’ of digitalisation and decarbonisation that have motivated European economic and infrastructure policy over recent years (Government of Ireland, 2022; Kovacic et al., 2024), the premise being that efficient digitalisation will ‘unlock’ both economic and environmental sustainability by precipitating the ‘decoupling’ of economic growth and resource use through AI-led efficiencies (Riemens, 2024). However, the basic contradictions of such an approach are apparent when addressing the resource and energy demands of AI-led data centre growth, as material requirements for the ‘twin transition’ fail to keep pace with the degree of expansion (Parton, 2023).

This article, therefore, critically analyses the contestations that arise from planetary data flows (Lehuedé, 2024) with a distinct focus not only on the sites of friction and resistance around environmental impacts and transparency, but also how our approach must evolve to navigate a landscape of turbulent antagonisms responsive to industry strategies and state policies. To that end, Ireland is leveraged to understand how these contradictions give rise and respond to locally distinct forms of protest and activism. In particular, we argue that Ireland has been a ‘canary in the data mine’ for the infrastructural and climate antagonism that is now emerging across the world, with the ongoing imposition of AI. We, therefore, argue the need to move beyond approaches that contest the specific and isolated impacts of data centre expansion and instead address these infrastructures as a potent byproduct of the marriage between digital and eco-modern capitalism, which has become the dominant frontier of accumulation, production and value-creation (Lehuedé and Valdivia, 2025; van der Vlist et al., 2024). To this end, we present this intervention in the emerging field of critical data centre studies, utilising a reflexive theoretical methodology to leverage our activist and media scholarship positionality to understand what can be gleaned from Ireland’s response to rapid data centre expansion.

Critical data centre studies and infrastructural activism

For the last two decades, media scholars have focused on the material implications of media economies, such as the ‘dematerialisation’ of digital media through imagery such as the cloud (Carr et al., 2022; Reading and Notley, 2015). However, this article focuses on two specific offshoots: the emerging subfield of critical data centre studies (Edwards et al., 2024) and the literature surrounding (media) infrastructural struggles amidst the economies of ongoing expansion (Lehuedé, 2023; Rone, 2024). Data centres are sites where the material economies and consequences of digitalisation intersect, as ‘multiply extractive’ facilities, whereby the extractive character of society-wide datafication (Couldry and Mejias, 2019; Reading, 2014) overlap with the ecologies of traditionally extractive ‘resource’ industries (e.g. energy, water, minerals; Hogan, 2015; Taffel, 2023). Activists have increasingly recognised that contesting these infrastructures requires opposing global supply chains across different sites whereby the ‘object-concept that enables scrutiny of the modes and modalities by which Big Tech impacts and increasingly shapes society and alters planetary conditions’ (Edwards et al., 2024: 440), as a reshaping force rather than a discrete object. Therefore, we must interrogate not only what a data centre consumes, but the very activities and strategies it supports and organises towards.

Critical data centre studies

Critical studies of infrastructure (Easterling, 2014) have long analysed the intersections of the state and the private sector in shaping the development and operation of physical networks of material circulation. While media infrastructure studies, part of the same material turn in the humanities and social sciences of digital media, mobilise a similar critique towards the specific materialities of telecommunication and information (Hesmondhalgh, 2021; Parks and Starosielski, 2015; Plantin and Punathambekar, 2019). A data centre, therefore, appears to be a natural point of refinement for these approaches, as a media distribution infrastructure (Sandvig, 2015) that is overwhelmingly operated by private companies but requires immense resources for the everyday activities of billions around the world. Unsurprisingly, the subfield of critical data centre studies (Edwards et al., 2024; Velkova and Plantin, 2023) emerged as a way to unite these various approaches to analyse the object of the data centre.

As Edwards et al. articulate, critical data centre studies exists as a framework to support and sustain activism around data centres, identifying big tech as a primary antagonist within what is ultimately a variegated industrial landscape, including the big tech hyperscalers all the way to old school internet exchanges (2024). This ‘subfield’ has organically emerged around this ‘eventful node’ in the digital economy, often through the impacts of the extractive relations it manages. However, as it currently stands, this is not what most scholars in media studies have taken up, at least in how the field has been retroactively marshalled. Our framework aims to follow Edwards et al.′s call by bridging the material gap between organising around data centres and the critical research infrastructures that have started to form to support that activism on the ground, which has not always provided a clear political entry point due to the complexity of relationships between the state and its digital infrastructure partners (Brodie, 2020a). Namely, we argue that adopting an ‘infrastructural disposition’ (Parks and Starosielski, 2015) also means orienting oneself, whether academic or activist, in relation to not only the data centre itself, or the resources, ecologies, and other material economies it interfaces with, but the broader systems of exploitation that support these strategies and the antagonisms this inevitably creates.

In academic analysis, there is a difficulty in moving beyond a recognition and analysis of materiality as ‘impacts’ rather than material commitments of a broader political economy that requires diverse resource inputs and necessary waste outputs. Admittedly, this transcends our specific subfield, which speaks to institutional limitations and norms around what constitutes research versus activism. Similar to other contemporaneous material turns, which have seen media scholars interfacing more frequently with ‘impacted’ communities in the ‘field’ (Brodie and Barney, Forthcoming), the focus on emplaced materialities and/or global scale has occasionally orientated the subfield of media infrastructure studies away from the structural forms of antagonism in the development of data centres globally, choosing instead to hone in on industrial policy or localised relations and lifeworlds. As many scholars of data centres and their wider supply chains have articulated, however, these relational spaces do not emerge without friction, due to immense power imbalances between multinational corporations and local communities (Brodie, 2020b; Childs, 2022; Lehuedé, 2023; Rone, 2024; Valdivia, 2025).

Data centres force the political into the equation by the scale, acceleration and coalescing factors of their development, and have thus invited explicitly political approaches, albeit sometimes requiring a clearer political horizon. Despite this, without keeping big tech multinationals ² as the core force of antagonism within the compounding environmental contradictions raised by digital expansion, we risk contributing to the reification of the object of analysis (a data centre) as something deserving of study or existence in and of itself, where frictions exist due to the apparently extraterritorial character of data centre development (Reading and Notley, 2015). A data centre, instead, must be contextualised as a node (however critical) within a broader network of accumulation whereby materials (land, data, energy, water) are transmuted in service of digital capitalism. With the ongoing expansion of AI, mobilising statistics on energy and resource impacts becomes politically valuable only when these material contradictions risk the economy itself. Therefore, the data centre industry can manoeuvre in this limited space, mobilising imaginaries of economic growth, to further entrench their position as all-encompassing ‘solution machines’ for a sustainable future (e.g. ‘the twin transition’), while ultimately furthering their accumulation, as seen in contemporary political debates in Ireland (O’Halloran, 2025).

In civil society, the cause of critical data centre activism has gained prominence among digital rights organisations, which have a strong legacy of holding international organisations, such as the UN and the EU, to account through the lens of human rights and digital governance. However, these approaches come with historical and conceptual limitations, particularly in relation to the limited geographical jurisdiction and embedded imperialist or colonial hierarchies, which some argue privilege particular ‘acceptable’ rights-based approaches to regimes of access as a means of coercive ‘soft power’ (de Souza, 2025). This is an area where data centres have offered a distinct avenue for mobilisation, through organisations such as the Green Web Foundation, the Contested Data Territories Initiative, the Data and Society Institute and an unfolding array of international civil society meet-ups surrounding data centre activism (Kneese, 2025). A clear movement is building, focused in large part on changing policy through strategic grassroots organising. Despite this activity and the valuable intellectual work of connecting green extractivism, militarisation and the exploitation of the global south, the actual policy aims, as framed by and within necessary digital expansion, have as yet failed to produce major victories beyond localised stoppages. This is not to say this will never happen, but rather, the challenge is pressing and must urgently respond to the coercive lobbying power of US big tech, which aims to entrench the logics of AI growth into European industrial policy and beyond.

As suggested by both critical scholars and industry commentators (Pasek, 2023a; van der Vlist et al., 2024), the speculative expansion of data centres amidst the AI boom is part of a strategy of ‘locking in’ this infrastructure as a ‘sure bet’ for development and progress. Thus, this increasing integration into energy, water, and mineral supply chains globally requires radical conceptual frameworks to scale with the industry, as they become increasingly central to our energy futures (Libertson et al., 2021). Therefore, framing our horizons of struggle in terms of reducing ‘impacts’ limits the scope of effective antagonism, leaving us to fight on acceptable and marginal terrain through mechanisms to ‘green’ or ‘optimise’ the externalities of US big tech’s eco-modernist gambit. However, this strategy is insufficient when weighed against the near-totalitarian influence of US big tech, the embedded logics that pervade industrial-scale AI, and, fundamentally, the frontier-seeking nature of Capitalist accumulation, as guaranteed by US imperialism. Fighting for increased efficiency, transparency and mechanisms of ‘damage control’ can instead ensure the continuity of this system of extraction that ultimately empowers the interests of US Big Tech expansionism. We thus see analysis of the data centre as opening up space to attune our political orientations, our ‘infrastructural dispositions’ against the most productive and agential antagonists, in particular a US imperialist configuration of big tech. In this context, we see that it is not enough even to be activists; we must also, more essentially, be anti-capitalists and anti-imperialists. As environmental scholars and activists, fighting for a more just future, we must recognise the risks of this ongoing ‘infrastructural capture’ and its implications for global justice (Lehuedé and Valdivia, 2025) and the public good (Bridges, 2024), particularly amidst rapid climate breakdown, as the industry faces sympathetic state regulators by leveraging their effective imaginary of ‘re-industrialisation’. While digital rights approaches and activist-leaning researchers have a key role to play, it is instructive to learn from and invite in wider struggles around infrastructure in the context of grassroots decolonial, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist organising. We therefore present examples of global infrastructural resistance from across the world and detail the development of this growing antagonism in Ireland.

Global infrastructural activism

Local environmental politics are often the starting point for meaningful contestation around infrastructural harms, particularly from the perspective of developmental politics and environmental justice. Larkin argues that infrastructures can be understood not just as discrete technical objects but also ‘on the level of fantasy and desire’ (2013: 333), embodying a broader imaginary of societies’ understandings of progress and modernity. Data centres increasingly embody these imaginaries of desire; they are used as a rhetorical device by a state to signal an eco-modern, tech-friendly economy (Huang, 2023), but their environmental toll reveals a disjunctive reality of relentless energy and water consumption (Hogan, 2015). However, it is not enough to say that ‘resistance’ arises when there is ‘friction’ (Johnson, 2019). ‘Circulation struggles’ (Clover, 2016) and ‘planetary data turbulence’ (Lehuedé, 2024) have frequently been considered in terms of actions against the development of infrastructure, such as fossil-fuel pipelines and data infrastructure by Indigenous, anti-colonial and anti-capitalist groups (Bosworth, 2022; Spice, 2018). However, these paradigms must also apply whether the contestation is for or against a particular project or economic flow. Take, for example, the popular movement for an Apple data centre in Ireland, called ‘Athenry for Apple’, which mobilised pro-developmental arguments at a time of austerity-induced reduction of financial flows and industrial opportunities for that rural region (Brodie, 2020b). Therefore, we are reminded that infrastructural activism aligns with the conditions of possibility arising from particular, place-based, and context-specific orientations.

Looking beyond Ireland for a moment, we can see how some of these struggles have taken shape. Rone (2024) describes the unique characteristics of opposition to data centre proliferation in the Netherlands and outlines that the ‘single biggest grievance’ (6008) was directly related to concerns about democratic autonomy over the planning system and, specifically, ‘the unaccountable power of corporations’ (6008). The patchwork of opposing community groups included citizens of all stripes, from a collective of farmers (Data Non Grata) to concerned local residents (Red de Wieringermeer) and ‘rebel’ politicians. Through this unlikely coalition, forged through the effects of planetary data turbulence, the devolved autonomy of local councils was short-circuited into an instrument of data centre resistance, ultimately leading to pioneering national regulation of data infrastructure. Therefore, this resistance can be understood not just as opposing data centres as objects but as an effort to short-circuit the logics of digital capitalism, through its infrastructural data flows, as embodied by the data centre. However, even this victory exposed the limitations of regulatory reform alone, with large-scale developments still finding a way through. ³

Johnson (2019) presents a distinctly different outcome in Iceland, where data contestation failed to emerge amid increased data flows, facilitated by narratives and government strategies of tech-induced growth and prosperity, much like the Athenry example in Ireland. Johnson describes Reykjanes, the province in Iceland, as a ‘non-eventful node’ (2019: 75) within a ‘high-tech transnational connection’ (2019: 76). The data centre campus in Reykjanes was built on a former US military base and is, therefore, entwined with the legacy and future imaginaries of this imperialist project. Local politicians touted an economic boon, desperate for a win following the 2008 financial crisis. Years later, the results have not met rhetoric, with few Icelanders employed beyond the initial construction phase, thus highlighting how antagonism can fail to coalesce when confronted with industry-oriented promises of economic revitalisation.

In Chile, Lehuedé (2023) details how activists from urban Santiago opposed a different node of the data centre supply chain, where raw resources such as lithium are extracted and contested within Indigenous territories. This antagonism specifically focuses on water as a utility, resource and lifeway to contest extractive development. This demonstrates how infrastructural data flows and antagonisms can situate within alternative ontologies and epistemologies, that can be mobilised to resist their capture and appropriation. As Valdivia (2025) and Childs (2022) have made clear, examining data centres and their resource supply chains within differentially colonised contexts of ‘development’ provides insight into how US big tech formalises its frontiers of extraction and industrial organisation. Scholars, including Anne Pasek, Fieke Jansen and Corinne Cath, have worked alongside activist campaigns to develop critical policies that address these distinct situations and horizons of community organising (Jansen and Cath, 2024; Pasek, 2023b). However, how do we consider these models and instantiations of development across distinct geographical contexts and inequalities? Lehuedé (2024) posits that, through planetary data turbulence and with an emphasis on antagonism, the imposed silicon roots of data circulation can be short-circuited and unearthed.

Ireland, therefore, presents itself as a unique point of observation; a historically colonised ‘Global North’ country that is now fully operational within the capitalist world system as a semi-peripheral state, demonstrating elements of each of the above examples. Given Ireland’s distinct developmental and geopolitical context, these infrastructures have assumed an intensified role in the economic landscape, particularly amid emerging geopolitical alignments in Europe, and historical dependencies on imperialist powers (Bresnihan and Brodie, 2025). Our intervention, in the next two sections, is that data centres, and specifically the activism surrounding them, can be viewed productively in the wider context of these developmental strategies, pointing towards avenues of mobilisation that navigate the turbulence and antagonism of an accelerating push for AI capacity.

Irish data centre resistance

20 November 2024: the annual Data Centres Ireland conference is due to take place in the RDS Convention Centre in Dublin on this cold winter’s morning. Billed as the largest annual gathering of Irish data centre professionals, they congregate to network within this rapidly expanding industry. As suit-clad attendees stride through the doors, ready to network and extol the virtues of AI expansion, coffees in one hand and iPhones in the other, the ringing of chants can be heard just a few metres away: ‘BIG TECH IS OUR FOE, DATA CENTRES HAVE TO GO!’ (Extinction Rebellion Ireland (XRi), 2024). A coalition of activists from Extinction Rebellion Ireland (XRi), Friends of the Earth Ireland (FoE), Not Here Not Anywhere (NHNA), ⁴ the Irish Palestinian Solidarity Campaign (IPSC), and others chant together, with placards tightly held between their woollen mittens. Outside, Rosi Leonard, data centre lead at FoE, explains: ‘This is about the public good, not about big tech. Neither our energy system nor our decarbonisation commitments were planned to serve the needs of one industry’ (Friends of the Earth (FoE), 2024).

This has become an almost annual tradition for the climate movement in Ireland: letting the data centre industry know they’re keeping a close eye on them. However, unlike previous years, the action escalates. As the Chief Information Officer for the Irish Government, Barry Lowry delivered his keynote speech, a small number of activists interrupted with chants lamenting the toll that data centres are taking on the Irish energy grid, likening it to a modern form of colonisation (XRi, 2024). Unsurprisingly, the protestors were quickly removed, but other activists maintained a banner-laden barricade at the front entrance (Figure 1), preventing other punters from entering the building. Eventually, the barricade was broken, and business as usual tentatively proceeded. Business as usual in Ireland, however, is not the norm everywhere, at least not yet.

Figure 1.

Protest outside the 2024 Data Centres Ireland conference.

For a country of its size, Ireland has a significant proportion of data centres, with 121 operated by just 24 providers as of 2024 (Walsh, 2025). As a result, data centres’ electricity consumption exceeds that of all urban households in Ireland (Walsh, 2025). The International Energy Agency projects that this electricity consumption could reach 32%, as soon as 2026, although Eirgrid has disputed this ‘alarmist’ estimate and presented the more moderate figure of 25.7% (O’Doherty, 2024). Water usage presents a similar inequality, with the average data centre reportedly using up to 500,000 litres of treated water a day to cool these energy-intensive structures, while the ‘Meta’ data centre complex in County Meath consumed a staggering 659 million litres of water in 2023 (Woods, 2020), nearly double that of the company’s next most water-intensive facility in Fort Worth, Texas (Meta, 2024).

Of course, this strategy of unmitigated growth reached a crisis point, forcing the government to implement tighter regulations. As a result, a ‘de-facto’ connections moratorium was placed on ‘constrained regions’ and existing data centres were required to rely on their own backup generation on request (CRU, 2021). While a solution to the immediate problem of blackouts, this has led to an increase in the use of gas-fired plants and diesel generators for backup electricity generation, as well as the use of exemptions to utilise this backup generation more frequently (O’Carroll, 2024). Ironically, amidst domestic energy security concerns, Irish data centres have enough private fossil-fuel generation to power the entire country of Ireland (MacNamee, 2023). Ireland’s planning process has also experienced drastic reform to accommodate data centres as strategic infrastructure (Walsh, 2025), although this has yet to be commenced in domestic law. In addition, an unprecedented policy allowing ‘private wires’ to be constructed for private energy provision is quickly progressing to meet the needs of large energy users (Mercier, 2023). Therefore, the gravitational pull of data centres is extending beyond the consumption of material resources but bending the very infrastructural and planning norms of the state. Tensions, however, extend beyond civil society, with a top civil servant offering a stark assessment that the Irish government must choose between building more houses or more data centres (O’Doherty, 2025b). Amid a housing crisis, this highlights the extent to which the Irish government facilitates the most resource-intensive operations of these companies while reconfiguring national infrastructure to the demands of FDI (Bresnihan and Brodie, 2025). The Irish government’s support is so emphatic that it has lobbied against reporting requirements under the European Energy Efficiency Directive (Judge, 2023), requesting certain exemptions for Irish data centres (Boylan, 2024).

Tracing data centre resistance in Ireland

Data centre contestation in Ireland has evolved from occasional acts of environmental lawfare (Brodie, 2020b) to protracted civil society campaigns, often fought in the public sphere, to shape the regulation of these infrastructures. The first high-profile case of data centre opposition in Ireland concerned the planned €850m Apple data centre campus in Athenry, Galway, announced in 2015 (Brodie, 2020b). Unlike Rone’s (2024) observations in Wieringermeer, the Netherlands, many citizens in Athenry were mobilised in favour of the Apple project, enamoured by the imaginary of Irish economic development and contemptuous of the perceived ‘culture of [planning] objection’ (Brodie, 2020b: 4) that could risk this economic revitalisation. Much like Johnson (2019) observed in Iceland, this prevailing attitude was amplified by austerity in the wake of the post-2008 financial crisis, allowing imaginaries of infrastructure as a mode of postcolonial economic progress to take hold (Larkin, 2013). However, unlike the passivity of the Icelandic example, the central legal challenge arose on environmental grounds, which would indirectly shape all future opposition and policy formation concerning data centres in Ireland. A very small group of environmentally-minded activists successfully opposed the project through objections in the national and local planning system, despite vigorous push-back culminating in a 2000-strong march of local Athenry residents and politicians (The Irish Times, 2016), with one politician stating: ‘Hope has been in poor supply in this country and this [project] gave us hope. . .’ (Brodie, 2020b: 7; Figure 2). In 2018, Apple finally declared it would not proceed with the project, and then-Minister of Business, Enterprise and Innovation stated the case highlighted ‘our need to make the State’s planning and legal processes more efficient’ (Taylor and Hamilton, 2018). While public attitudes towards the benefits of data centres would shift in the coming years, subsequent governments would remain fixated on remedying this setback to their FDI-led developmental approach by exceptionalising data centres within domestic planning law and policy, including successive statements on The Role of Data Centres in Ireland’s Enterprise Strategy in 2018 and 2022. These statements and policies privilege data centres not only as providers of economic development but also as techno-solutions and infrastructure themselves, from the technical regulation of the energy grid to the provision of proprietary ‘private wires’ to meet their electricity demand (CRU, 2025; Mercier, 2023).

Figure 2.

Pro-Data Centre Rally, Athenry 2016.

In these early days of data centre activism, Ireland was positioned as uniquely suitable due to its climate and business environment. This led to a narrative of exceptionalism, in which Ireland could host the most environmentally ‘sustainable’ data centre developments by leveraging the promise of these material conditions, such as the vast capacity for wind generation (Bresnihan and Brodie, 2025; Brodie, 2020a). However, as the practical constraints became clearer, public and academic discourse started to catch up with the warnings of environmental activists. The grassroots environmental group NNHA was one of the first to include data centres as a central campaigning plank (Not Here Not Anywhere (NHNA), 2019). While not started as a data centre campaigning group, their mission statement for a fossil-free future had to account for data centres’ rising role in fossil fuel demand. In 2023, NHNA launched a standalone data centre campaign called ‘Press Pause on Data Centres’ (NHNA, 2023). Not satisfied with the ‘de-facto’ moratorium this call for a national moratorium would act as a lightning rod for other campaigns. Collaboration between Irish climate activist groups is stratified and often itself frictional due to distinct campaigning methods and theories of change. Despite this, coalition-building NGOs like Stop Climate Chaos and the Environmental Pillar exist to coordinate capacity and campaigning across (mainly) NGOs, while organisations like Gluaiseacht organise events and financial support for the grassroots. Environmental justice groups XRi and Slí Eile primarily focus on direct actions to raise awareness, while articulating anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist sentiments to varying degrees. In contrast, NHNA and FoE are explicitly ‘environmental’ and primarily focus on lobbying politicians, planning submissions, and policy briefings. At the same time, long-established groups like Friends of the Irish Environment (FIE) and An Taisce continue to pursue legal avenues, including planning submissions and high-profile climate litigation. Meanwhile, localised campaign groups such as Futureproof Clare, Future Generations Kerry, Galway Against Gas, and others largely address large-scale developments within their respective counties, while focusing on adjacent fossil fuel projects, such as the long-embattled Shannon LNG project. Nevertheless, these groups largely share the same core analysis that fossil fuel projects are proliferating to support the demands of US big tech. ⁵

In recent years, activist collaboration has expanded beyond climate activism. In 2022, as part of the ‘Make Amazon Pay’ campaign, Progressive International (founded in 2020 on principles of global social and economic justice) collaborated with NHNA, XRi and local unions to organise an action on Black Friday in opposition to Amazon’s working conditions and data centre strategy writ large (McCurry, 2025). Ireland has become an organising point due to the location of the European headquarters of many US multinationals. The action involved a protest by approximately 20 activists and trade unionists outside Amazon’s European headquarters in Dublin, with protesters chanting to Amazon workers inside the building to join their demonstration. This was the first time data centre opposition was mobilised within the broader narratives of workers’ rights in Ireland. The following year, in the cover of darkness, a large projection was beamed onto the same Amazon headquarters with campaign messages such as ‘More Data Centres = More Blackouts’ and ‘€43.8 Billion in Profit, €0 in tax’ displayed for passersby to see (XRi, 2023; Figure 3). A union organiser and former Amazon worker, Emilio Maira Santos, spoke at the action, once again calling on other Amazon workers to join: ‘From the workers' movement, we offer international solidarity and the alternative for a democratically controlled planned economy that respects the limits of nature’ (XRi, 2023).

Figure 3.

Data Centre Protest outside Amazon Headquarters, Dublin 2024.

Workers in Ireland appear to be heeding the call, to an extent, as industrial action from Connect Union members was narrowly prevented at a Meta-owned data centre campus in County Meath a year later (O’Donovan, 2024) and growing configurations of tech workers seeking to flex their collective muscle. Increasingly, both intersectional solidarity and workplace organising are being expressed within the Irish data centre movement. In 2024, ‘The People’s Inquiry on Big Tech Harms’ (Uplift, 2025) was held by the Irish community organising group, Uplift. While not strictly focused on data centres, many participants discussed the systemic harms of data centre proliferation and Ireland’s increased responsibility to regulate them, given their disproportionate number in the country. One particular angle, which was reflected at the data centre conference in Dublin, is the connections to Israel’s ongoing occupation of Palestine and the genocide in Gaza. At data centre protests in Ireland, it’s not uncommon for the IPSC to attend and share chants such as ‘We don’t want AI taking Palestinian lives’ (XRi, 2024), referring to the use of AI-driven targeting systems in Israeli military operations, such as ‘Nimbus’ and ‘Lavender’. Local branches of the global ‘No Tech for Apartheid’ campaign, established by present and former workers at companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, have organised against tech industry events hosting companies implicated in the Israeli war and occupation economy. In addition, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties filed a complaint against Microsoft for processing Palestinian data in Irish data centres (Beesley, 2025).

Through these actions and events, we can see how data centres are emerging as a means to confront the planetary data flows of the US big tech economy, while also emerging in parallel with and in relation to campaigns against the fossil fuel infrastructure. Several activists, for example, have provocatively spun the title of Andreas Malm’s book, How to Blow Up a Pipeline (Malm, 2020), to ask ‘Should we blow up a data centre?’. While a thought exercise, like the book, it does raise the question of escalating tactics as the democratic window closes and familiar means of action fail to yield results. Similar escalations can be seen in Palestine Action’s infrastructure disruption campaign in the UK and Ireland, with direct action against weapons manufacturers, contractors and US military infrastructure in these countries. These actions highlight the growing awareness of the role of US big tech and related actors in imperialist warfare, and should not be viewed as separate from environmental justice campaigning, particularly given the increasing entrenchment of green and digital supply chains in EU security discourses (Bosworth, 2022). Civil and uncivil society in Ireland are already connecting the dots in ways that provide analytical clarity for those of us committed to environmental justice. Which raises the question, how will those of us in academia, or otherwise, aid or hinder these efforts?

‘Impacts’ and antagonism

Conceptual and empirical precision is needed regarding the stakes of data centre activism, roughly reflecting the enduring problems of the often limiting ‘local/global’ ethos that has foreclosed meaningful channels of solidarity in climate movements. In Ireland, we have found that groups are responding to particular developmental politics and projects through the state’s strategies. However, this mobilisation reveals distinct limitations. Through this, Ireland offers an instructive case study of the levers of mobilisation and the sites, places, and ways in which antagonism forms, or fails to form. We propose a few conceptual and methodological reorientations surrounding climate impacts, antagonism and the broader assemblages these sit within. In particular, we criticise the ‘data centre’ as the object of analysis and instead position it as the point through which to analyse the assemblage or network that organises through and around it. The object-orientation of critical data centre studies, inherited from media infrastructure studies, specifically has risked reifying the ‘data centre’ in a way that, at its worst, unhelpfully feeds into industry narratives (and reverse critiques) of their necessity, which have emerged as a specific formation out of industrial orthodoxies dictated by monopoly tech.

Firstly, while largely oriented around concentrated or distributed environmental or climate effects, the generalising approach to ‘climate impacts’ risks falling prey to the climate reductionism of many mainstream environmental movements that operate within a hegemonic framing of ‘climate as a problem’ (Buck, 2022). This, therefore, enables the industry to activate its own net-zero and sustainability reporting mechanisms, which ultimately allows it to shape our planetary future while further ingraining techno-solutionist modalities (Buck, 2022; Pasek, 2019). In Ireland, these tactics have been effective in ensuring the centrality of data centre proliferation as a ‘guarantor’ of a green transition (Bresnihan and Brodie, 2025). Government and data centre providers alike have claimed their presence in the Irish market creates an anchored demand for renewable generation that would otherwise be unused or wouldn’t come on-stream without their electricity demand (Walsh, 2025). Despite these claims, the electricity demand of Irish data centres is, in fact, massively outpacing additional renewable electricity production, with ‘only 16% of data centre demand covered by additional renewable capacity between 2020 and 2023’ (Daly, 2024b: 31), largely through Corporate Power Purchase Agreements. Climate and environmental impacts remain a potent way to understand and articulate the geographical externalities of digital growth, whether in the form of data centres or associated projects. However, we argue that this impact focus has limited researchers’ and activists’ ability to consider an alternative framing of the infrastructural and planetary flows of datafication.

Fighting against individual data centres or even particular government contexts ultimately fights on the ground of data centre development, and unsustainable data centre expansion is often seen as a breakdown rather than a function of the wider milieu of digital supply chains, largely organised around US big tech. In Ireland, data centres, as part of the wider strategy to attract FDI through infrastructure facilitation, are crucial to organising the state’s purported climate transition strategies (Bresnihan and Brodie, 2025). The infrastructures of big tech are then purported by the state as necessary means of development, and the acceptable window of resistance becomes a fight for a ‘less damaging’ and ‘more regulated’ development, while accepting the underlying premise of its necessity. While some have considered what alternative digital infrastructural frameworks might look like, for example, ‘decentralised and rooted in care’ (Frenzel and Mosso, 2023) or smaller-scale tinkering even across national borders (Laser et al., 2022), these solutions do not resolve the problem of fundamental antagonism that drives our current policy. Within this new phase, campaigners and critical voices must be clear-eyed that this is not just about data centres; this is about an extractive business model that operates a particular role in the unfolding relations of digital capitalism, increasingly through the guise of the ‘twin transition’. This is not to say that we should necessarily rekindle a broadly anti-AI Luddite movement (though the conditions for this may be rapidly forming) but rather that the specific capacities of critique towards data centres must be expanded to understand not only wider ecological ‘impacts’ but their operations across multiple regimes of state, corporate, and planetary politics at once. In our mind, this cannot be grasped without taking an explicitly anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist infrastructural orientation (King and Murphy, Forthcoming; Lehuedé and Valdivia, 2025) rather than operating within the limited realm of sustainability. We argue that to truly be critical, we need to recognise the fundamental antagonism of AI-led digital growth, and to politically mobilise around the implications of that antagonism, in terms of how these economies enroll ecologies and places towards unequal and monopolistic forms of accumulation and transition and understand how that implicates data centres in structures and actions, from extraction to genocide.

Therefore, our second conceptual reorientation re-centres antagonism as a structural and fundamental feature of the global supply chains of digital media, in which data centres function as an ‘engine’ for US big tech. The answer for critical scholars is not to move beyond simply embracing the wider resource supply chains of these expanding economies, but to engage with these discrete and distributed sites of ‘harm’ and agential resistance in the face of ecological and widescale social damage caused by these companies and their emplaced operations. In Ireland, as elsewhere, we see clearly how agency and organising can emerge from this antagonism, a central facet of a historical materialist approach to capitalist expansion. Activist movements respond to conditions of possibility, cultural milieus and legal contexts in geographically defined ways, organising across, within, and beneath borders. Refusing to recognise antagonism as a structural relationship between distributed agency and state/capital alliances is a hindrance to a meaningful (materialist) analysis that corrects rather than mitigates the fundamental inherent contradictions of digital growth represented in the data centre industrial complex (Hogan, 2021), and externalised as the developmental concept of the twin transition. Recognising this structural antagonism often means naming and blaming big tech and its imperialist backers as the core hindrance to environmental justice in the digital sphere, and understanding that localised democratic politics will be mobilised around the often haywire political orientations that arise from developmental politics.

While this would appear to dissolve the necessity of the data centre as a point of analysis – ‘aren’t we then just critiquing the unfolding harms of the digital economy? – it is about emplacing the data centre as a key component in the machinery of state-supported private digitalisation, whereby the agency of capital accumulation confronts the antagonism of place-based ecological and otherwise resistant movements. While this appears differently in various contexts, it is our role as critical scholars to develop the analytical tools that can reframe these fundamental antagonisms as space for alliances and solidarities, with meaningful possibilities for building and collaborating on frameworks and tactics to account for and resist the compounding, proliferating expansion of unjust digital technologies.

Conclusion

As described throughout this article, the landscape of data centre activism in Ireland remains primarily driven by climate concerns, for obvious and highly justified reasons. This is largely because climate groups were among the first to lead the charge towards regulation and moratoria in response to environmental crises and contradictions. These are crucial demands, as it has become abundantly clear that the contradictions arising from large-scale digitalisation in Ireland at a time of necessary decarbonisation are proving insurmountable. Over the course of writing this paper, it has become a relatively mainstream position to be ‘anti-AI’, a position dominated by environmental impacts and, usually, an accompanying focus on data centres. From Indigenous activists centring water and resource sovereignty in disputes with hyperscale data centres (Lehuedé, 2024), to transnational and translocal groups focused on the climate implications of AI growth (Valdivia, 2025), this is an opportunity to join struggles. We are especially encouraged, at the European level, by attempts to bring civil society campaigns together across digital rights and environmental justice organising, and in the US and Latin America, strong and emerging local and transnational movements which have successfully blocked or disrupted multinational data centre development as part of broader anti-AI environmental organising. In Ireland, we have been inspired and galvanised by recent anti-data centre coalitions across anti-imperialist, human rights, and environmental justice campaign groups, especially in local chapters of No Tech for Apartheid and similar contestations against Ireland’s complicity in economically and technologically supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza through data centres located here. However, the ongoing primary focus on climate concerns and making visible data centres for regulatory scrutiny may, as we suggest, be playing into the industry’s hands at this stage in the fight. While environmental concerns must remain a part of the approach, those on the frontiers of big tech activism and critical research can learn from the growing internationalist solidarities and connections emerging within Irish civil society and global data centre movements more broadly.

In Ireland, popular antagonism is often embedded in a longer historical chain of environmental and anti-colonial justice struggles. This links them materially to liberatory political ideologies, including specifically anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism, that we find essential for understanding what is at stake in the grounded antagonism against data centres. However, this must necessarily extend beyond Ireland in the form of translocal and internationalist solidarity to uproot the structural features responsible for infrastructural contradictions, as an Irish climate group says, ‘Not Here Not Anywhere’. It is through these intersections that we can better understand data centres as eventful nodes in a broader process of extraction and dispossession in the service of digital capitalism, as guaranteed by US big tech, and thus uproot these silicon roots to confront something deeper and more connected. Therefore, we ask academics and those in civil society to think critically about their positionality in relation to normalising paradigms that bolster digital capitalism, whether through ‘twin transitions’, ‘sustainability’, or ‘sustainable development goals’, and to embrace grounded analysis and materialist antagonism to empower alternative and convergent paradigms of infrastructural possibility.