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Nobody hosts datacenters in Ireland because of capacity reasons. It's not a good location for power, people or connectivity. They host them there for tax reason

by spwa4 4mo ago

Nobody hosts datacenters in Ireland because of capacity reasons. It's not a good location for power, people or connectivity. They host them there for tax reasons. You can bet your firstborn these datacenters are only the exact size that is the minimum allowed by tax law, not a square millimeter more. Yes, datacenters are critical internet infrastructure. But in Ireland they're more like a sailing ship with the sails mounted underwater, because that's cheaper for tax reasons.

infinite_spin 4mo ago
https://enterprise.gov.ie/en/publications/publication-files/the-value-of-data-centres-to-ireland.pdf https://enterprise.gov.ie/en/publications/publication-files/... > it is estimated that in 2024, of the order of ~€104bn in annual GVA, 876,000 jobs and €14.6bn in annual employment related tax was enabled by the availability of digital infrastructure provided by data centres located in Ireland. Seems like the economics of hosting these data centers benefits Ireland substantially, even with their tax breaks.
- spwa4 4mo ago
  Yes, at the cost of removing at least double, and for FANG companies about triple, the tax revenue from other EU governments. And that's just counting company tax (and only specific companies, ie. this is why the "billionnaire tax" is so low, well, this is the EU component of it) (technically: FANG taxes in Ireland, in violation of OECD treaties, is 12.5%, and for other very large companies 15%. If your company is not at least a certain size, and you haven't transferred "company IP" into Ireland during a certain window that's now closed, other taxes that don't increase with revenue will raise effective tax to as high as 55% for sole traders. And the actual FANG income is mostly generated in France and Germany, who have 25% and 30% company tax rates respectively, with some other EU countries higher still. In other words, this is the tax system billionnaires salivate about: it's a regressive tax, specifically designed to make the ultra rich richer, and push everyone else's wealth down hard, even people outside of Ireland) PLUS the income tax lost for both other EU countries and employees, because for most FANG employees, this is also a tax increase (assuming they chose to move to Ireland rather than stay in the Netherlands or elsewhere in the EU) I mean we should unite against this! This system is making literally everyone in the EU poorer compared to the US tech sector. From an unemployed Romanian in a long term care facility to a French billionnaire. All are losing money through this system.
  - infinite_spin 4mo ago
    Why should Ireland, a historically poor nation that has been exploited by European powers for centuries, be concerned with the taxes that other (much larger) governments collect? The entire point of tax sovereignty is to avoid this exact issue.
    - spwa4 4mo ago
      So they should take away other people's money because they can, because of stuff that happened a long time ago, and when they feel like they should be able to just take stuff from other people for some random long ago reason ? I'm so exited finding someone like you! I'm much like Ireland. I was born desperately poor. My parents gave me second hand presents on , if that. I couldn't pay for my school things back then. I got "support" of child services until I, quite literally, threw them out (down a staircase to be exact), and then decided to study and fix things myself. I'm decently rich now, but not rich enough. Given that you support people just stealing because of not-valid past grievances ... Where do you live and where do you hide the cash?
      - infinite_spin 4mo ago
        > So they should take away other people's money because they can Ireland isn't stealing from other people by changing their tax policies to attract business, that isn't theft by any stretch of the imagination outside of a libertarian one that posits all taxation is theft.. and you haven't answered my question: Why should Ireland change their tax policy to benefit other (much larger) governments? It's fairly insulting that you've described the Irish as thieves, something Europeans have done for centuries, just because you want more tax revenue for other, much larger, governments.
        spwa4 4mo ago
        The reasoning that Ireland's tax policy is theft is not discussed here from a "taxation is theft" perspective, but from a "we should tax the rich" perspective. Because Ireland is in the EU, this effectively halves taxes on most big international companies in the EU (less than half of what it is for everybody else/normal companies in the EU), and makes it 12.5% for a few specific FANG companies. Which is deeply unfair, from two main perspectives: 1) everyone should be taxed the same. Big, small, local, global, ... it should not matter (if anything global should be taxed more than local) 2) it only works because everyone's tax revenues go down a lot, which means yet again the rich escape taxes 3) it makes something like EU corporate tax initiative, which is horrible (it involves an extremely complicated way of attributing specific transactions to specific locations and then taxing them locally. However, like the EU VAT initiative it's main problem is how complicated it is)
rsynnott 4mo ago
> Nobody hosts datacenters in Ireland because of capacity reasons. It's not a good location for power, people or connectivity. It is, ah, probably about the best location if you want connectivity to both the US and continental Europe (and also, oddly, Japan, via an arctic cable). A big fraction of total transatlantic connectivity goes through Ireland, and there's substantial redundancy. However, realistically, today datacenters are mostly built in Ireland because there are already datacenters in Ireland. There are no significant tax benefits to building them in Ireland vs most other countries, power is more expensive, and planning is more difficult (a lot of proposed datacenters for Ireland are now being refused planning, due to either grid constraints or dirty backup power arrangements). But, say, eu-west-1 is the biggest European AWS region, so why, as an Amazon customer, wouldn't you use it? (This is also a thing with us-east-1, which I think is still their biggest region despite their attempts to nudge people away from it to east-2...) Expansion by _existing_ datacenter operators, who came in ages ago when the connectivity advantage was more of a big deal, seems to be the major driver. I don't think anyone who doesn't already have datacenters in Ireland is trying to build them; these days there are other locations with appropriate connectivity, cheaper power, and less fussy regulators.

by spwa4 4mo ago

infinite_spin 4mo ago

https://enterprise.gov.ie/en/publications/publication-files/the-value-of-data-centres-to-ireland.pdf https://enterprise.gov.ie/en/publications/publication-files/... > it is estimated that in 2024, of the order of ~€104bn in annual GVA, 876,000 jobs and €14.6bn in annual employment related tax was enabled by the availability of digital infrastructure provided by data centres located in Ireland. Seems like the economics of hosting these data centers benefits Ireland substantially, even with their tax breaks.

spwa4 4mo ago
Yes, at the cost of removing at least double, and for FANG companies about triple, the tax revenue from other EU governments. And that's just counting company tax (and only specific companies, ie. this is why the "billionnaire tax" is so low, well, this is the EU component of it) (technically: FANG taxes in Ireland, in violation of OECD treaties, is 12.5%, and for other very large companies 15%. If your company is not at least a certain size, and you haven't transferred "company IP" into Ireland during a certain window that's now closed, other taxes that don't increase with revenue will raise effective tax to as high as 55% for sole traders. And the actual FANG income is mostly generated in France and Germany, who have 25% and 30% company tax rates respectively, with some other EU countries higher still. In other words, this is the tax system billionnaires salivate about: it's a regressive tax, specifically designed to make the ultra rich richer, and push everyone else's wealth down hard, even people outside of Ireland) PLUS the income tax lost for both other EU countries and employees, because for most FANG employees, this is also a tax increase (assuming they chose to move to Ireland rather than stay in the Netherlands or elsewhere in the EU) I mean we should unite against this! This system is making literally everyone in the EU poorer compared to the US tech sector. From an unemployed Romanian in a long term care facility to a French billionnaire. All are losing money through this system.
- infinite_spin 4mo ago
  Why should Ireland, a historically poor nation that has been exploited by European powers for centuries, be concerned with the taxes that other (much larger) governments collect? The entire point of tax sovereignty is to avoid this exact issue.
  - spwa4 4mo ago
    So they should take away other people's money because they can, because of stuff that happened a long time ago, and when they feel like they should be able to just take stuff from other people for some random long ago reason ? I'm so exited finding someone like you! I'm much like Ireland. I was born desperately poor. My parents gave me second hand presents on , if that. I couldn't pay for my school things back then. I got "support" of child services until I, quite literally, threw them out (down a staircase to be exact), and then decided to study and fix things myself. I'm decently rich now, but not rich enough. Given that you support people just stealing because of not-valid past grievances ... Where do you live and where do you hide the cash?
    - infinite_spin 4mo ago
      > So they should take away other people's money because they can Ireland isn't stealing from other people by changing their tax policies to attract business, that isn't theft by any stretch of the imagination outside of a libertarian one that posits all taxation is theft.. and you haven't answered my question: Why should Ireland change their tax policy to benefit other (much larger) governments? It's fairly insulting that you've described the Irish as thieves, something Europeans have done for centuries, just because you want more tax revenue for other, much larger, governments.
      - spwa4 4mo ago
        The reasoning that Ireland's tax policy is theft is not discussed here from a "taxation is theft" perspective, but from a "we should tax the rich" perspective. Because Ireland is in the EU, this effectively halves taxes on most big international companies in the EU (less than half of what it is for everybody else/normal companies in the EU), and makes it 12.5% for a few specific FANG companies. Which is deeply unfair, from two main perspectives: 1) everyone should be taxed the same. Big, small, local, global, ... it should not matter (if anything global should be taxed more than local) 2) it only works because everyone's tax revenues go down a lot, which means yet again the rich escape taxes 3) it makes something like EU corporate tax initiative, which is horrible (it involves an extremely complicated way of attributing specific transactions to specific locations and then taxing them locally. However, like the EU VAT initiative it's main problem is how complicated it is)

rsynnott 4mo ago

> Nobody hosts datacenters in Ireland because of capacity reasons. It's not a good location for power, people or connectivity. It is, ah, probably about the best location if you want connectivity to both the US and continental Europe (and also, oddly, Japan, via an arctic cable). A big fraction of total transatlantic connectivity goes through Ireland, and there's substantial redundancy. However, realistically, today datacenters are mostly built in Ireland because there are already datacenters in Ireland. There are no significant tax benefits to building them in Ireland vs most other countries, power is more expensive, and planning is more difficult (a lot of proposed datacenters for Ireland are now being refused planning, due to either grid constraints or dirty backup power arrangements). But, say, eu-west-1 is the biggest European AWS region, so why, as an Amazon customer, wouldn't you use it? (This is also a thing with us-east-1, which I think is still their biggest region despite their attempts to nudge people away from it to east-2...) Expansion by _existing_ datacenter operators, who came in ages ago when the connectivity advantage was more of a big deal, seems to be the major driver. I don't think anyone who doesn't already have datacenters in Ireland is trying to build them; these days there are other locations with appropriate connectivity, cheaper power, and less fussy regulators.