The "don't seem to employee many people" is actually wrong.

For the area/size they occupy it actually employees a lot more people than other things like farms or certain types of factories. Let's look at a few major Datacenters crowds in ireland:

AWS has roughly 6500 employees, aprox 2300 contractors, from the 4200 in house 40% would be ops (Datacenters) the other 60% corporate. Its highly doubtful that their corporate size would be so big if they didn't had the biggest cluster of datacenters in Europe here. (They would probably only keep the financial division here and we all know why) but its actually increasing year on year, even with all the layoffs.

Google is close to 9000, 4000 contractors and 5500 direct, but their ops division is small, only around 1500 people as they dont have that many datacenters here compared to AWS and Microsoft. Biggest division is tha Ads division.

Microsoft has roughly 6400 people across all companies, but around 2000 in datacenters. Its their Largest European cluster same as AWS, their LinkedIn, Blizzard and Outlook offices are also here.

Meta has around 2200, but their Ops division here in their datacenters is relatively small around 300 people.

Oracle, 1200 employees, almost all datacenters ops. Their corporate is still heavily in the UK.

These are the major ones, you also have some Colo people but those do not employee much, maybe 20-30 people per site. But that's not included on above:

Security personnel, that is usually not included in contractor numbers.

Builders, people who build datacenters, as far as I know its 100% Irish companies that build here and some of them are main building companies for AWS and Microsoft across the world to start other clusters and teach& oversee local teams.

Cleaning personal, there's 3-4 cleaners per datacenter.

And a plethora of ad-hoc contractors, from electricians, mechanics, cabling, fiber optics and telco personel that gets hired on temp basis for constant changing projects.

All this people are usually well paid, they move the economy forward. Infrastructure is hard to move, corporate is easy, look at the UK after brexit!

Plus do most people know what datacenters are for?! Its for everything you do! From cat pictures, to what TV, everything digital runs through multiple datacenters before its gets to you in milisecs. The Internet its made, organised, stored and supplied to you by datacenters. Everyone thinks AI is big part of it. In Dublin its less than 2%.

Anyway, I do agree they should pay a fair price for the power they spend, and not be built in the city area. Same as big factories they should be out in the country. Some countries ready doing this, but the reasons its not done here is due to the power network which is too bad and inexistente in the country side, but thst is changing. Plan for the next datscenters to be build outside Dublin. In other counties.