Paris Marx: Ireland's gas pivot warns US data-center fights

Paris Marx, author of *Hyperscale*, uses a new piece in Wired to argue that American towns fighting data centers should study Ireland, where limits on the grid did not shrink the industry so much as redirect its hunger for power.

Dublin's grid operator found it lacked capacity for new data-center connections and imposed a moratorium in 2021. The policy didn't necessarily stop expansion; it "pushed some operators toward gas generators and plans for dedicated gas-fired plants," Marx tells Wired. His warning for the US is that connection limits may change how a facility gets electricity without removing its demand for power, or the emissions that follow.

Marx also points to The Dalles, Oregon, where residents spent nearly a year getting figures showing Google used 29 percent of the city's water.

The piece threads its US guidance through a longer history that reaches from antiwar protests targeting American computers during the Vietnam War to current fights in Ireland and Chile, plus moratoriums in the Netherlands and Singapore dating back to 2019, and an alternative vision anchored in a New Zealand community project. Four of the commentators we track in AI Weekly's Who's Who had circulated the piece by the time we wrote this.