Una Mullally: Über 870.000 Arbeitsplätze durch Rechenzentren geschaffen? Bring mich nicht zum Lachen
https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2026/06/08/una-mullally-over-870000-jobs-created-by-data-centres-dont-make-me-laugh/
Von No-Outside6067
Una Mullally: Über 870.000 Arbeitsplätze durch Rechenzentren geschaffen? Bring mich nicht zum Lachen
https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2026/06/08/una-mullally-over-870000-jobs-created-by-data-centres-dont-make-me-laugh/
Von No-Outside6067
31 Kommentare
> KPMG is a serious consultancy but these are not serious figures. You simply cannot attribute that many Irish jobs to data centres, no more than you can attribute every job in Ireland people travel to by car to the existence of traffic lights.
She makes a good point. People who commute to work by car, would you say the job is attributed to the car industry?
I’d be surprised if it was 8700.
What is the total population of Ireland at this point- 6 ish million? Workforce of 3-4 million? So ~20% of jobs in Ireland are created by data centres? Interesting if true but I am not buying it either
Perhaps they are counting the 869,900 „influencers“ that use data from these operations
Ah here, of course it’s not 870,000 jobs directly created by data centres. This is the number of jobs which are dependent on the MNC sector, of which the government believes investments into data centres is an important part of keeping those jobs.
And the story Ireland tells is so different to everywhere else because we are pulling in tens of billions of Corporation tax because these companies are claiming to have Ireland as their main base. Part of which is because they can prove they have made large investments in this country.
Before data centres were as widespread companies used to just host their servers inside the company offices. Datacenters have created almost no jobs nationwide in this country aside from the very short term construction jobs and then the 4 blokes who work in the 40 acre building after the place is built.
Omg. Its time for a Revolution
That number has gotten a better massage than I’ve ever had in my life.
That report was such an embarrassment to all involved. Mad that the tax payer footed the bill for such nonsense.
>Across six sectors in Ireland, data centres that are located in Ireland underpin:
>• €104bn in annual GVA (19.4% of Ireland’s total GVA)
>• 876,000 jobs (32% of national employment)
>• €14.6bn in employment related taxes generated (28% of Ireland’s total employment related tax)
Nah they mean 870,000 jobs lossed globally probably
Does she have the ability to laugh?
while incredulous at first, there is links between the switch of multinationals from localisation to cloud services. by making ireland the cloud ops centre of us operations, it gave companies like google, aws and microsoft a reason to expand here first, which in turn led to support companies, and startups linked to this.
while data centres are themselves bad (for the environment, direct employees and the local regions hosting them), the countries that do host them tend to get all the auxillary businesses, including financial, services, data privacy and protection as well as r&d for the data stored in them. This mullaly character seems to be massively bullshitting herself (the “sure, why do we need food from supermarkets, when i can see cows in a field” mentality that doesnt think macro), but the numbers are closer to the kpmg report than “2 lads turning the switch on” she thinks is involved
I mean she’s right on that particular point. Claiming that all tech jobs in Ireland are somehow underpinned by the location of data centres here, doesn’t follow at all.
However, there’s a whole data centre boogeyman thing going on here which is largely borrowed from the US.
According to the report we have 36 data centre sites in the country with an average of 2 buildings per site.
That’s it.
Per-capita that’s relatively high on a European basis, but there are geographic and climate reasons for that. It’s about half of what the US has, per-capita. And we’re not building nearly as many DCs as the US are for AI.
So transposing the same arguments from the US, isn’t really relevant here.
Our issue is energy generation, not consumption. Fighting to reduce consumption is a sticky plaster. Energy demand will always increase. The way out of this is fast-tracking generation projects.
And investing in research. Microreactor research is a fast-growing area where a small nuclear reactor could potentially provide enough power to serve an entire datacentre (and then some). It’s unfeasible at present, but they’re making big breakthroughs as people come around to nuclear power as an actual clean and feasible solution.
The headline of the article is inaccurate. The KPMG report refers to jobs being ‘underpinned’ by data centres, in the same way one could say the tax or education systems underpin jobs.
Kpmg have a long history of scandals regarding lack of independence and audit failures so I’d be wary of anything they say.
Mostly they are trying to drum up the numbers by addjng any job that touched the data center from construction jobs to build it down to the kid who makes sandwiches in the deli for a worker at the data center.
The day to day employment of direct workers is very small for data centers
I doubt the number is high as 870000 but considering Mullally history and areas of experience I won’t take her ‘analysis’ either. Especially as number employed in ICT (information communications and technology) is around 170000.
There are construction jobs but they are temporary, there is servicing and maintenance jobs they are more than people suspect but not big. There are other jobs linked to the data centres: legal and accounting services. Still nowhere near the 870000 figure.
I am mostly in favour of data centres as we have made it so difficult to build anything in Ireland that data centres actually represent something of industrial investment. We should be charging them appropriate amounts for building water/waste water and renewable energy infrastructure. Some investment is better than nothing.
Even if you added up all the people who ever worked for/in the data centre industry either directly or indirectly, cant see the total being 870,000, maybe if all the related service industries. That being said Reddit seems to believe that these massive data centres are operated by 1 part time transition year student.
I work for a hyperscaler and I live in the USA, but I adore Ireland and the people of Ireland. Please don’t be fooled by the hype. These data centers will be autonomous to a large degree, requiring very few people to staff them, and within five years, most will cease to exist when usage peaks, levels off, and then trends downwards. Please don’t subject yourselves to the foolery that my nation has ignorantly embraced.
80 bajillion jobs generating record profits!! The man on the street will see the benefits any day now!
She is probably right to question the 870,000, but the frustrating thing is that we are pretending anyone’s mind is really going to be changed by it. The whole things is political. Lots of people hate AI, hate datacentres, and will always find any reason possible to object to them. Others are inherently pro-technology and will always support them.
The jobs figure is dubious but I also think her energy argument is dubious. Ireland’s energy is expensive primarily for two reasons: (i) we’re heavily dependent on imported gas which is expensive (and dirty) and (ii) we have very high fixed infrastructure costs because the country is sparsely populated so demand is spread out, plus infrastructure costs are massive in this country and even worse with a state agency with no competition.
The problem with (i) is Nimbys objecting to wind and solar and nuclear. The problem with (ii) is sparse demand which can actually be helped by datacentres. They can contribute to fixed costs and even out demand without requiring peak loads which is what ultimately determines the cost.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/how-data-center-power-demand-could-help-lower-electricity-prices
Datacenters need staff when they are being built (contractors). There is handful of staff on the premises (or nearby) as on call engineers, for on hands support like fixing hardware issues, regular maintenance or letting in other contractors to the datacenter. General security is handled by contractors also.
Apart for hardware reasons (replacing, installing, general maintenance) you can manage things from thousands kilometers away.
So when everything settled down (DC built, cabling and hardware done) it creates new jobs for less than 50 people or even less in the area it’s built. You can hire 200 people in US, contracted to India for managing almost everything of DC.
You don’t expect Meta employee to deal with cooling and HVAC system of datacenters right? It’s just getting dealt by another contractor company which services other datacenters or big plants.
To use a technical expression, we use in the trade, it’s a load of ffing bollox.
They’re counting jobs like construction jobs, which are temporary.
Actual workers in the data centers are around 6-10.
Not a fan of her but she’s not wrong on this.
So her suggestion is what… we opt out of what could turn out to be the most consequential economic revolution of our lifetimes?
Only true if we have 200,000 data centres
These data centres have only two employees each; one is a human and the other is a dog. The human’s job is to feed the dog and the dog’s job is to make sure the human doesn’t touch the servers.
Ive done those reports before.
You can basically put in any number you want, i put in a number once BP that was 100 times higher than my original sensible estimate because thats what the client wanted.
100% of the time you check with the client on the more outrageous claims, they will have signed off on the 900k number 100%.
Data centres create jobs in phases. During construction, absolutely loads. After.. not so much. So probably right but as usual misleading.
What exactly will the jobs be in the data centres? Hand knitting the fucking cables?
Every data centre I’ve been to has had like 3 – 5 employees running the place.
After construction data centres directly employ tiny teams of people, with some periodic roles contracted out.
Even saying tens of thousands would be incorrect.
There are around 82 fully operational data centres in ireland.
Each one of these has a team of about ~20-30 employees maintaining day to day data centre operations. Then you might have upwards of 80 supporting staff doing contract work like maintenance etc.
So let’s say you have 100 staff per data center which is definitely a high estimate. That’s only 8000 jobs, of which only about 20% are full time roles.