The impact of the proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) on Ireland’s energy demands is “not going to be as steep as many people believe”, Research Ireland has told an Oireachtas committee.
Research Ireland, which was established last year by an amalgamation of Science Foundation Ireland and the Irish Research Council, was before the newly formed Joint Committee on Artificial Intelligence on Tuesday.
The International Energy Agency expects data centres to consume close to a third of total electricity in Ireland by 2026. They used about 22 per cent of all metered electricity here in 2024, according to Central Statistics Office data.
The current boom in AI is rapidly fuelling increased need for data centre capacity, as AI relies on vast consumption of data, and, by extension, energy. A ChatGPT query is said to consume 10 times more electricity than a Google search.
Asked about the need for more data centres and the impact of this on resources, Ciarán Seoighe, deputy chief executive of Research Ireland, said a price “will have to be paid”, but that evidence is emerging it may not be “as steep” as current projections suggest.
“The projections are based on a straight line increase or even a curve up increase in the energy demands, but already we are seeing in the research area examples where that is not only deflected down, but hopefully even pivoted down,” he said.
“I’m not going to say this is a problem that is going to disappear, but I expect it to be less demanding than what the current projections would be. It is still a huge consumption of resources, not just of electricity.
“It’s not going to go away. We are going to have to pay for this in some sense, but I don’t think the penalty is going to be as steep as many people believe.”
Separately, Mr Seoighe said he had concerns over the “dominance of Big Tech” and the resources multinational companies have to invest in AI, which could leave state actors playing catch-up.
“There was talk at one point of a CERN [the European Organisation for Nuclear Research] for AI, because, as a small state, we are not at that level where we can invest the many, many millions required to be able to do this level of research,” he said.
“But, if at a European level, we had a large scale centralised investment, of which we could be a part, then we have the scale and the power to do real research in the area, and stay ahead of the curve.”
Research Ireland’s Susan Leavy, who is also an assistant professor with the School of Information and Communication Studies at UCD, said the issue that “keeps me awake at night” is the use of AI by “pernicious actors” to influence political viewpoints and elections.
“You have that possibility for pernicious actors to interfere [and] generate loads of AI content, and it could be super personalised to sway people’s beliefs, voting patterns, polarise people, and that undermines democracy,” she said.
“The AI-generated content on social media hasn’t yet been shown to have had an effect in elections. However, what we do know is the political polarisation in society coincides with the proliferation of the recommender algorithms.”
