Ireland will be home to TikTok's first data centre in Europe. The Chinese social network, currently at the centre of tensions between Washington and Beijing, is merely the latest in a long line of companies to have decided to build a data storage and processing facility in the European country. The announcement was made in August by global head of information security Roland Cloutier.

Microsoft, Facebook, Google and Amazon have all set up enormous data centres in Ireland — data storage facilities that operate seven days a week, 24 hours a day. Amazon, for example, runs several facilities and just two months ago announced a thousand new jobs for the construction of a site in Drogheda, on Ireland's east coast.

1.25 billion years online in 2020

To guarantee its users "a safe and risk-free experience" and "faster loading times" for the app, Cloutier said, TikTok will invest 420 million euros, with the aim of bringing systems online in early 2022. Physical systems such as these are indispensable for sustaining the pace of users' browsing around the world, given the surge in network traffic and computing volumes.

According to data from Digital 2020. Global digital overview, by We Are Social and Hootsuite, 4.5 billion people use the internet globally and, in 2020 alone, are estimated to spend a combined 1.25 billion years on it. An enormous figure, even when looking solely at data for Italy: 49.48 million users browse the internet. Not to mention time spent online: an average of 2 hours and 24 minutes a day for 3.8 billion users.

Data centres becoming ever more energy-hungry

Concerns about high energy consumption, including that required for cooling, are a constant. Yet advances in technology have made it possible to reduce disk consumption — as watts per terabyte is commonly expressed — and to make processes more efficient, that is, watts per megaFLOP.

Even setting aside the issues of personal data protection and the environmental impact of these systems, as important as they are, the "energy challenge" facing the country is already daunting in its own right. The first companies to look to Ireland as a golden land for building their data centres were the likes of Intel and Pfizer, between the 1960s and 1980s. Interxion arrived in 2004. In 2011, Google announced an investment of 75 million euros and converted an industrial zone in west Dublin. "Dublin has the right combination of energy infrastructure, developable land and available workforce for the data centre," the company writes. And these are just a few examples of the enormous investment flows channelled into the country.

Data centres: up to 47% of Ireland's total energy demand by 2028

The latest EirGrid report sets out an telling scenario regarding the exponential rise in data centres' energy consumption. By 2028, it notes, they could account for the largest share of Ireland's energy use. In the best-case scenario, over the next ten years energy demand from data centres will grow by 23 per cent. Otherwise, it will reach 47 per cent.

The need to find cleaner energy sources than conventional ones is growing ever more pressing. In August, Facebook signed an agreement with local supplier Brookfield Renewable to power its data centre in Clonee, a village in County Meath, with wind energy. Amazon, meanwhile, announced it will invest in a new 115-megawatt wind project at Ardderroo, in the Galway area. The facility is forecast to be able to power all of its data centres in Ireland from 2022.

Greater energy efficiency when the data centre is submerged

A few days ago, Microsoft retrieved the cylinder housing a submerged data centre that was lowered to the seabed in 2018 off the Orkney Islands, in Scotland, in order to observe how it had fared underwater. The operation to retrieve the cylinder — part of what is known as Project Natick — took an entire day. Apart from the layer of algae and anemones covering it, the data centre was in perfect working order. Only 855 of the servers had been damaged underwater, a lower percentage than that recorded on land. The researchers attribute the system's greater efficiency to two factors: the pumping of nitrogen rather than oxygen inside the cylinder, and the absence of human beings.

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Microsoft has pulled its second underwater data center out of the water in Scotland cnn.it/3kuTij2

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How to prevent fossil fuel consumption from rising

Companies are not always mindful of the type of energy powering their servers. In July, the Business Post reported that some hi-tech giants were using fossil fuel-powered plants. The reason: a lack of capacity in the electricity grid. It is for this reason that An Taisce, Ireland's well-known environmental NGO, is now calling for closer oversight and more effective regulation of the energy sources powering data centres.

Added to this is the need to streamline permitting procedures. The most unfortunate case is Apple's abandonment of its plan to build a data centre in Galway after three years of opposition. Part of the local population feared the environmental impact on the area, while the other part was keen to boost local employment.

What is certain is that ever more energy-hungry giants will build data storage and processing systems in these lands, with the need to process quantities of information that were previously unthinkable. Building smarter, more resilient infrastructures — capable of handling any level of demand, integrating renewable technologies and promoting the decentralised production of energy — could help to balance peaks in demand.