Joe Lynam

Breakfast Business with Enterprise Ireland on Newstalk.

An estimated $5.2 trillion worth of investment is set to go into data centres over the next five years to meet the huge anticipated demand for AI services.

Very little of that will take place in Ireland.

According to Digital Infrastructure Ireland, an effective moratorium on new centres alongside crippling infrastructure inadequacies such as water and power signals that Ireland is effectively closed for business.

DII, which champions data centre investment, says the entire economy will lose out without major strategic change in government policy.

And Maurice Martel is the chair of Digital Infrastructure Ireland and is sitting in front of me.

Good morning, Maurice.

What is the current state of play when it comes to data centres in terms of the law?

We know that Eamon Ryan, the previous environment minister, imposed a moratorium.

Is that quasi-lifted now or what is the situation?

So all the stuff that's opening up now has been in the pipeline for years, is that it?

Absolutely, yeah.

Okay.

Do you accept that data centers will eventually account for something like 30 to a third of our entire electricity demand in the next five years?

Do you accept that a third is a huge amount for an economy to have on one sector only, data centres?

Which may or may not get completed.

projects that were planned to be delivered in Ireland.

I presume you welcomed the budget from last week, which focused on infrastructure rather than giving a tax cut to the rest of us.

Meanwhile, other countries are moving on.

Trump was in the UK last month and they had, you know, $50 billion worth of investment money, which I suppose we hoped we'd see here.