Rundale

Patrick Bresnihan and Patrick Brodie

‘We just have to get those off-shore wind farms over the line, because that is the key for our self-reliance and independence in terms of energy, and also then it would enable us to have some future in terms of AI, because AI will use an enormous amount of energy, and we’re currently in difficulty on that front.’

So declared Micheál Martin in New York in late September 2025. The statement was partly in response to Trump’s comments that European countries were ‘going to hell’ for pursuing green energy policies. However, it also arises in the context of a wider discussion surrounding both offshore wind and the constraints being faced by the Irish grid amidst data centre growth. 

When it comes to data centres, Ireland’s energy constraints have been well-documented, with the industry utilising 22% of Ireland’s electricity in 2024 despite facing a de facto moratorium on grid connections in Dublin since 2021. These constraints have been a thorn in the side of successive Irish governments’ as they remain committed to ensuring AI competitiveness in line with the country’s European and US counterparts. 

In this context, we are more likely to see major data centre industry figures such as Peter Lantry (Managing Director for Equinix Ireland and a former EirGrid man) in the national press extolling the virtues of data centres as a sustainability solution, than we are to witness meaningful discussions about the viability of unfettered digital growth. Martin himself has often acted as a voice box for the data centre industry – in early 2025, he even chastised left parties and activists for their unjust ‘demonisation’ of data centres.

Martin’s statement in support of offshore wind for AI thus represents a familiar convergence between lobbying discourses and Government policy. What makes it remarkable though is that it captures a growing common sense that sees the expansion of AI (powered by offshore energy) as necessary for planetary decarbonisation.

The pairing of climate action and AI is not the preserve of the Taoiseach. It is at the heart of the EU’s ‘twin transition’ strategy of decarbonisation and digitalisation, intensified now by geopolitical competition and the ‘return’ of industrial policy in the bloc. And it is most clearly the position of Silicon Valley accelerationists, who have perversely ‘twinned’ sustainability and AI as a sort of existential universal necessary for engineering our way out of climate crisis. In 2024, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt casually dropped that the energy demand for AI was infinite and, since we were never going to meet our climate goals anyway, we may as well bet on building AI to solve the problem. This AI will require the construction of thousands of data centres to accommodate expanding computational needs.

Articulating political ecology helps to connect these dots of foreign direct investment, EU regulations, and the comprador state in the context of the eco-modern twin transition. If Martin and the Government have their way, Ireland will become a green tech laboratory supporting this eco-modernist fantasy. To do so, the state will need to radically transform its development landscape to accommodate further growth, which in turn will deepen our dependency on US monopoly tech as the determining force of Irish development.   

Monopoly control, not carbon emissions

The main criticism directed at data centres in Ireland, and elsewhere, has been their colossal energy use and related emissions. Data centres’ heavy energy (and water) footprint is a starting point, but a focus on these extraordinary statistics doesn’t help us to understand the political ecology of the tech industry – that is, the power this sector holds and how it uses this power to shape the form and direction of the energy transition. Even accusations of greenwashing – while entirely accurate – can draw attention away from the very real ways in which the US tech industry is dictating infrastructure projects, planning and geopolitical strategies in Ireland and elsewhere.

Since at least 2019, EirGrid has publicly stated that its demand forecasts and grid planning are ‘heavily influenced’ by the continued and expected growth of data centres. Over the past five years, we have seen the major tech companies (and their broad array of supporters) position data centres as essential rather than parasitic to a decarbonised energy system. Data centres are presented as vital to the development of district heating systems, the financing of wind and solar generation through Corporate Power Purchase Agreements, and to the creation of a grid capable of managing large amounts of erratic energy – adding energy to the grid ‘when dinners are being made, children’s baths are being run, and central heating switched on,’ and storing excess wind and solar energy when demand is low. 

The latest industry pitch, which aligns with Martin’s comments in New York, is that data centres can act as ‘energy refineries’ to process abundant offshore Atlantic energy into the profitable resource of data for export. 

In all these ways, data centre facilities are positioned as essential grid infrastructure – not just providing digital services, but energy services.

Of course, this is not done out of benign public interest. As any visitor to a data centre industry event will know, there is money to be made through the provision of these private energy services, and an ecosystem of comprador consultants and semi-states eager to make that happen.

Today, the data centre industry is as much about energy as it is about data. This is about more than their consumption of large quantities of energy, it is about the ability of tech companies to control infrastructure, policy and governance. The enormous concentration of power in and through these tech corporations needs to be understood in terms of monopoly tech. Monopoly tech is distinct from ‘big tech,’ which like big oil, big pharma, or big tobacco before it, describes the power bloc of industry interests that coalesce to form lobbies and influence decision-makers. Monopoly tech helps us to more closely understand the institutional and infrastructural mechanisms through which multinational technology companies assert their control over transnational supply chains and technological development.

It is no secret, for example, that the world’s three largest cloud providers control over 60% of global cloud market share. The risk of these companies extending their monopoly power into the relatively nascent AI industry is high, if not already materialised. The degree to which these companies, as extensions of US capital, are already influencing energy policy in Ireland, for example, and even affecting the ability of the EU to develop independent AI policy, is a stark warning as to the unaccountable direction of accelerated AI development leading the charge on ‘sustainability.’

The term monopoly tech also situates multinational tech companies within a longer history of imperial capitalist development, which has always been characterised by the systemic flow of value to the imperial core and (super)exploitation of land, labour and resources in the periphery. Monopoly capitalism, in spite of the perceived historical friction with a regulatory state, is not antithetical to state regulation. As Lenin famously details, monopoly depends upon the territorial integration of imperialist states via infrastructure and resources, enabled by the financialisation of the capitalist world system. 

This is clearly demonstrated in Ireland, where the state not only provides a low tax base for multinational tech companies, but land, infrastructure and planning mechanisms geared towards hosting some of monopoly tech’s most resource-intensive and high-emission operations. In the context of imperial monopoly capitalism, in a state structurally dependent on US investment, this arrangement is sold as existentially necessary for Ireland’s social and economic development.

Beyond FDI Nationalism

The naturalisation of Ireland’s dependency on US multinational tech companies is an intensification of what we have called elsewhere ‘FDI nationalism,’ a resource nationalism that rests on the idea that foreign direct investment is Ireland’s somehow natural(ised) resource from which sovereign wealth is generated. What it also expresses, however, is that this sovereign wealth is not actually held by or for the people – it is held, as it always has been, by and for multinationals and a few select compradors.

It is undeniable that Ireland’s corporation tax takes are exceptional, in spite of the well-known low (to zero) rates paid by US multinationals through Ireland’s financial regimes.  In 2024, Ireland’s corporation tax revenues rose to €28 billion. 75% of that came from US multinationals. This accounted for 29% of all tax revenue. In 2014, that number was 11%. These figures are a clear register of Ireland’s deepening dependence on the US, but they also represent enormous boons to the exchequer and sovereign wealth.

While it is essential to understand the role of US monopoly capital, one of the core components of FDI nationalism is also EU integration. Ireland’s FDI-led regime could not exist without its providing access to European markets for US companies. In this environment, the dream of utilising even such exceptional tax take for public infrastructural development turns out to be folly. Not only does the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council advise the state to avoid investing corporation tax into long-term infrastructure due to its perceived precarity. Since Maastricht (1992), EU competition rules prevent ‘unfair’ state involvement in sectors that have been opened to market competition – including energy, water, housing and transport.

We cannot re-nationalise energy, let alone digital infrastructure, without uprooting the basic facets of US multinational dominance over these sectors. And this cannot be meaningfully enacted until engaging with the protective trade rules in the EU which render states unable to truly develop resources publicly.

Ireland is not Bolivia, nor Venezuela. It is not under threat from a coup over its natural resources which have been industrialised by multinationals. Rather, it’s dependency on the US is somehow deeper, and more challenging to address. The coup has already happened, from above, by the compradors and in relation to a long history of US dominance and EU integration. If there is another coup on the horizon, it would be coming from lobbyists and think-tanks that see Ireland as a geostrategic hurdle for US-EU interests. The coup won’t come at gunpoint, but rather in conference rooms and via email assurances.

‘Are you for Republic or Empire?’

This paraphrased question from Bill Rolston and Robbie McVeigh has only become more urgent since the publishing of their book, Ireland, Colonialism, and the Unfinished Revolution in 2021. In particular, since October 7^th 2023 and the upswell of anti-imperialist sentiment in mainstream Irish politics. For us, this has meant more deeply analysing where Ireland sits in the capitalist world system and how this has changed over the last 60+ years. Something we attempt to do in our recent book, From the Bog to the Cloud: Dependency and Eco-Modernity in Ireland. 

The model of industrial and economic development that has rendered Ireland exceptionally dependent on the US is now at a crux point – something that is being recognised and discussed by orthodox economists as much as Marxist ones. But while the Government and its aligned commentariat are intent on doubling down in the form of a securitised and militarised ‘twin transition,’ we see the erosion of the last vestiges of neutrality which has been one of the anchors of foreign policy in the southern Irish state for nearly one hundred years. As poll after poll shows, neutrality also remains an enduringly popular policy position with the Irish public. This represents a profound contradiction between Ireland’s economic model and the democratic consideration of Ireland’s position in the world.

While energy policy and foreign policy might seem unrelated, we argue that the undemocratic character of many decisions being made about Ireland’s future exist on the same continuum, and represent a deepening of the structures of dependency into the state and its aligned civil society apparatuses. This is being pushed by many interests – the imported tech accelerationism of Collison, industry lobbies represented by the likes of Peter Lantry, think tanks like the Irish Defence and Security Association (IDSA) and their intellectual backers. 

What brings these groups together is a sense that Ireland’s challenges – including around the structure and direction of Ireland’s industrial and foreign policy in the midst of climate crisis and geopolitical instability – are too important to be left up to the people. Maintaining a democratic deficit, cultivated by and through the economic dependency of a postcolonial state, becomes a strategic imperative; a version of eco-modernity that is profoundly undemocratic. As these forces align and coordinate, the response from those of us who want a different future has to be similarly proactive, organised and strategic, drawing on the wave of hope and possibility opened up most recently by Catherine Connolly’s call for a new republic.