CLONDALKIN, Ireland — Dozens of massive data centers humming at the outskirts of Dublin are consuming more electricity than all of the urban homes in Ireland and starting to wear out the warm welcome that brought them here.

Now, a country that made itself a computing factory for Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and TikTok is wondering whether it was all worth it as tech giants look around the world to build even more data centers to fuel the next wave of artificial intelligence.

Fears of rolling blackouts led Ireland’s grid operator to halt new data centers near Dublin until 2028. These huge buildings and their powerful computers consumed 21% of the nation’s electricity last year, according to official records. No other country has reported a higher burden to the International Energy Agency.

Not only that, but Ireland is still heavily reliant on burning fossil fuels to generate electricity, despite a growing number of wind farms sprouting across the countryside. Further data center expansion threatens Ireland’s goals to sharply cut planet-warming emissions.

Ireland is a “microcosm of what many countries could be facing over the next decade, particularly with the growth of AI,” said energy researcher Paul Deane of University College Cork.

Tax incentives; a highly skilled, English-speaking workforce; and Ireland’s membership in the European Union have all contributed to making the tech sector a central part of the Irish economy. The island is also a node for undersea cables that extend to the U.S., Britain, Iceland and mainland Europe.

Ireland’s Environmental Protection Agency has also flagged concerns about nitrogen oxide pollution from data centers’ on-site generators — typically gas or diesel turbines — affecting areas near Dublin.

A crackdown began in 2021, spurred by projections that data centers are on pace to take up one-third of Ireland’s electricity in this decade. Regulators declared that Dublin had hit its limits and could no longer plug more data centers into its grid.

The backlash from Dublin-area local planning authorities — combined with stricter, if sometimes contradictory, guidance from the national government — has frustrated data center developers.

One fully built data center from Texas-based Digital Realty is sitting idle at Grange Castle while it awaits permission to connect to the electricity grid.

The company sells space within its data centers for such clients as banks, email providers and social media platforms. It says it lacks a grid connection despite contracting for enough renewable energy to power all of its Irish data centers.

“When we look at artificial intelligence, when we look at new technologies coming along the line, the basic requirement for all of those is power infrastructure,” Dermot Lahey, who directs Digital Realty’s data center implementation in Ireland, said inside a cavernous empty data hall. Ireland has all the elements to make it a “great home for AI expansion.”

“What’s preventing us from being able to leverage that is the fact that the power constraints that we have, or the power moratorium that we have, is greatly impacting our ability to provide space for customers,” Lahey said.