DIGITAL giant Amazon has once again stressed that it has no plans for a data centre near Clonakilty after locals expressed fresh concerns.

Earlier this year an appeal was lodged with An Coimisiún Pleanála against Amazon MCS Ireland’s plans to build a cable landing station at Tullyneasky West, near Lisavaird.

The site is about 5km north of Owenahincha where, if approved, Amazon’s planned Fastnet sub-sea cable would come ashore.

Residents living close to the site earmarked for the cable landing station feel their homes and quality of life would be impacted by the digital infrastructure project.

Further concerns have since been raised locally about the possibility of a separate data centre coming to West Cork, but Amazon said there is no truth to this. Teresa Cowhig expressed her worry online, posting that she had heard a data centre was planned for Clonakilty.

She wrote: ‘They use a massive amount of water and electricity. The pattern around the globe is the same, people are being told to use less water everywhere that data centres are built or planned.’

Cllr Isobel Towse (SD) said it was extremely unlikely that Amazon would build a data centre in the area looking at where they are currently located in Ireland, and considering how difficult it would be to get planning permission in a rural area popular with tourists.

‘I believe we need the cable and cable landing station but we do not need any more data centres anywhere in the country,’ said Cllr Towse.

Last month, a UN report on the environmental impact of unchecked AI growth cited Ireland as a ‘cautionary tale’ for the rest of the world. The report showed that 21% of all electricity used in the country was now being used for data processing.

The authors of the report pointed out that energy demand in Ireland ran ahead of infrastructure, with data centres now using as much electricity as all households in Ireland’s cities combined.

Cllr Towse suggested that people may have equated plans for a cable landing station with plans for a data centre, adding that Amazon had reassured her and other councillors in November that such a centre would not come to the area.

A spokesperson for Amazon Web Services (AWS) said: ‘As we’ve previously shared with The Southern Star, AWS does not – and has never had – any plans to build a data centre at the landing point in West Cork. The proposed cable landing station in West Cork is a small telecommunications facility. Such facilities form the backbone of the internet, and are commonplace globally where subsea cables land.’

AWS said subsea cables connected countries and continents to improve global connectivity and resilience.

The Fastnet cable would enhance connectivity between the United States and Ireland, supporting existing infrastructure with improved network performance and redundancy, the company said.

According to AWS, Netflix uses its service for nearly all its computing and storage needs, including databases, analytics, recommendation engines and video transcoding, ‘utilising more than 100,000 server instances on AWS’.

‘This enables Netflix to deliver billions of hours of content monthly to over 280 million members in more than 190 countries,’ according to the AWS website.

Fastnet is said to have a data capacity of 320 terabits per second (Tbps), meaning it can handle simultaneous streaming of 12.5 million high definition (HD) films.

On its website, the company states 2028 as the delivery date for the sub-sea cable. The project has been endorsed by Taoiseach Micheál Martin.