The dark side of Irish data centers

It’s the last week before Christmas but while everyone else may be winding up for the festive season, the news never sleeps. In this episode of the ITPro Podcast, Jane is joined by news and analysis editor Ross Kelly to look back at some of the biggest stories from the month of December.

Included in this episode:

Highlights

“Ireland has become a haven for a lot of big tech companies – Meta, Microsoft, Google – a lot of European operations for these big US tech companies [are] based in the Republic of Ireland. Essentially the big issue here is around the environmental impact and power grid capacity … electricity demand from data centers has grown annually by around 23% since 2015 so it’s quite a significant surge. There is a steady uptick [and] data centers currently use around a fifth of the country’s electricity supply.”

“Every so often we just get a new sector or a new job role where VR is going to, apparently, completely revolutionize how these people do their jobs and it’s people working in manufacturing, or it’s surgeons who can practice before they ever cut someone open in real life, or a pilot who can use a VR headset to do their simulations rather than just sitting in a pod. And I’m yet to see any of these really come to fruition … I just feel like VR to a great extent, and AR even more so, in some ways are a solution looking for a problem.”

“I think, more than anything, [the charges are] making a statement. The State Department, the FBI, CISA, they’ve been very upfront about the threat posed by fake IT workers and over the last couple of years taking a hard stance on this. Making it known that they’re aware of it and that they’re going to crack down on it, it might dissuade some individuals from getting involved in these types of schemes.”

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