Avaio’s data center in County Mayo, Ireland, has been delayed after an appeal against the project was filed by a group of local residents including bestselling author Sally Rooney.

The appeal was submitted to the Mayo County Council on May 21 by various individuals, among them Normal People author Rooney, a Mayo resident. The appeal is contesting the conditional approval given to the project by the Mayo County Council on April 25.

An appeal requires An Bord Pleanala, the Irish planning body that decides on appeals, to reconsider whether the project should be permitted or not. The body will reconsider the proposed development, and is subject to a statutory objective to make a decision to grant or refuse permission within 18 weeks. The Board’s decision is final, and can only be appealed on procedural and legal grounds through judicial review.

The data center, located at Killala Business Park, would be a two-story, 36MW facility with a gross floor area of 29,075 sqm (312,960 sq ft). Avaio, a US infrastructure investment firm focused on the digital, water, energy transition, and transportation sectors, bought the site in early 2022.

Avaio’s plot of land is located south of a factory formerly operated by Asahi, a Japanese chemical company, for the manufacture of acrylic fiber. A cable landing station, built by Irish digital infrastructure company AquaComms for its AEC-1 cable, is also located in the park.

Objections to the data center trace back to when permission to build the facility was first sought in November 2024.

In January, Rooney and several others made submissions arguing against its construction, citing concerns about the potential environmental impact, energy usage, and its effects on the Irish power grid. These worries are corroborated by a 2024 report from the International Energy Agency, which said that data centers could use up 32 percent of Ireland’s power by 2026 due to projects in the pipeline.

Colin Doyle, one of the original petitioners, made another submission to accompany the planning appeal, echoing arguments about the growth of data center power demand and the unreliability of Ireland’s Environmental Impact Assessment Report, which was used to adjudge the data center’s potential effects.

Doyle previously requested a judicial review for planning permission given to Art Data Centres’ 200MW campus in County Clare, but was dismissed in March of this year.

Ireland’s attitude towards data centers has shifted as the industry’s presence in the country has expanded. The concentration of facilities around Dublin, some of which are operated by large players like AWS, Microsoft, and Meta, led to concerns that eventually culminated in a de facto moratorium on new developments in the Dublin region imposed by grid operator EirGrid until 2028.

Avaio Capital was founded in 2016, and launched Avaio Digital Partners in 2021 to focus on the build-to-suit development of sustainable hyperscale data centers in the Americas and Europe. The investment firm recently signed an agreement to develop two 300MW data center campuses in Virginia, with one in Farmville and the other in Appomattox.