11 hours ago
Inside a data centre: Fourth Class students receive tour
From the outside it is a non-descript building without any signage in an industrial estate in west Dublin.
Inside the Equinix data centre, there are rows of servers supporting everything from internet banking to social media, and from artificial intelligence to tv streaming.
The first thing you notice inside the building is how noisy it is, and how cold it is.
Chilled air is pumped up from underneath the floor to keep the servers cool.
There are more than 80 data centres in Ireland and they are a vital part of the economy but they are also massive consumers of energy.
"At the moment in Ireland, 22% of all electricity is going to data centres," said Rosi Leonard, Friends of the Earth.
"So that's more than all urban homes in the country, it's huge."
"Ireland is also a global outlier. The EU average is around 2% of electricity going to data centres, we are almost 20% over that," Ms Leonard said.
Data centre providers insist they are taking steps to lessen their environmental impact.
"We are doing some grid response initiatives," said Warren Delaney, Ireland Operations Director, Equinix.
"We would be asked at peak time during the day at certain times of the year to disconnect our data centre load or partial load from the grid to help with the pressure that might be on the grid at the time," Mr Delaney said.
A group of local school children from Scoil Ghráinne Community National School in Dublin 15 got a tour of an Equinix data centre today, to learn what exactly happens inside these facilities.
"I learned that this place holds all the internet and if the power goes out, it doesn't go out in here," said Graham Phelan, Fourth Class.
"You use things like Snapchat, Xbox, Instagram and TikTok, they are all powered by a data centre," said Sharon Olaitan, Fourth Class.
Their classmate Audrey Gudz also learned a valuable lesson from the data centre trip.
