# Irelands Data Centres Last month, the United Nations did a report on the environmental impact of artificial intelligence on the world. And in this report, June 2026, so this is the entire world, they highlighted Ireland as a cautionary tale of what can happen when too many data centers are built. Ireland is beholden to gigantic tech corporations. Google, Amazon, Facebook, Uber, Apple. They all have their corporate headquarters in Ireland because we have a very low tax rate of 12.5% corporate tax rate. Some of them don't even do that. They're able to do some type of fancy fucking legal money laundering where they pay less than 1% tax. So Ireland, we allow the wealthiest corporations in the world to launder their money and pay no tax. And in exchange for that, we get some jobs. Now what's happening is, it's not just corporate headquarters that are being built, it's data centers. They're flocking here. They create very little jobs. The UN report showed that data centers in Ireland use 21% of our electricity, compared to 4% in the US and 1% in China. So data centers are using 21% of our electricity? Now, just to piss you off, because it's so frustrating to see the online discourse with people blaming immigrants, riots in the streets, because people are angry about immigrants. Here are the figures, and these figures are from another report that was commissioned by Friends of the Art. Data centers are using 21% of Ireland's electricity, so what? Who cares? Why do I care what a data center electricity it's using? There's loads of electricity, who gives a shit? Do you hate it when your electricity bill comes in? Are your electricity bills really fucking high? And you get that feeling of, I don't understand this, what's happening? I'm really confused and angry. This electricity bill, increasingly, it's starting to look like a loan repayment on a car. This electricity bill is starting to look a bit like a mortgage. What the fuck is going on here? Data centers are adding 360 euros a year onto your electricity bill in Ireland. 360 euros onto your electricity bill. That's the estimated cumulative average for every household in the country. Electricity is a finite resource. Fossil fuels are burned to create that electricity. That costs money. There's a giant building over there that isn't paying any tax, that isn't implying a lot of people, that belongs to a billionaire, a multi-multi-billionaire. That's costing you, personally, 360 euros on your electricity bill. Electricity prices in Ireland are 40% above the EU average. The average Irish household electricity bill, about 1400 euros a year. About 400 euros of that is caused by fucking data centers. Now, my podcast wouldn't exist without data centers. This is uploaded to some server somewhere that's in a data center. Your photographs that you take go to a data center. The internet is on data centers.