The Irish government is reconsidering nuclear power in response to skyrocketing energy demand from the data center market.

According to reports from the FT, the Irish government has shown willingness to explore nuclear power, with Taoiseach Micheál Martin recently claiming during a business dinner that Ireland is “open to that [nuclear].”

Ireland has maintained a legal prohibition on nuclear fission for electricity generation for nearly three decades. However, over the past year, there has been an increasing push to roll back this veto. In May, Fianna Fáil TD James O’Connor proposed a bill that would lift the ban and allow nuclear power to be officially evaluated.

Appetite for nuclear power has increased mainly because of surging demand from the data center sector. In July, it was reported that data centers in Ireland consumed 23 percent of the country’s total metered electricity during 2025. As a result, data centers in Ireland now consume almost as much as all households combined. Ireland has seen a huge proliferation of data centers since 2015, with data center power consumption rising by 518 percent. Currently, more than 80 data centers operate in Ireland, with major clusters in the Greater Dublin area.

Despite this footprint, Ireland is heavily reliant on energy imports, with approximately four-fifths of its energy coming from abroad. Most of this is tied to gas power, which accounted for around 40 percent of its electricity generation last year.

The pivot to nuclear would not be quick, however, with a nuclear power plant taking between six and ten years to construct on average.

“Nuclear is certainly not something that can address any of those challenges in the next 15 to 20 years,” Hannah Daly, professor of sustainable energy at University College Cork, told the FT. “Nuclear will face the same, if not more, constraints as the offshore wind industry is facing — and offshore wind doesn’t rely on importing uranium”.

Nuclear has become a hot-button topic in the data center sector, due to its baseload generation profile and low-carbon credentials. This has led several large hyperscalers to contract power from large-scale plants within the US market, with Google, Amazon, and Meta all signing deals.

Data center companies have also invested heavily in advanced nuclear technologies, particularly small modular reactors, which have seen growing support worldwide. Notable examples include Google, Data4, Oracle, Switch, and Equinix.

Most recently, Crusoe partnered with Aalo Atomics on what could be the first nuclear-powered AI data center at the Idaho National Laboratory.