That 56 seconds, it took me to swim that gold medal win. I looked for that feeling for 30 years,

and I never found it. A podcast about the people behind the medals. On the podium from the BBC World Service.

Find it wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

Have you ever wondered what a data center sounds like?

Actually, let me start from the basics.

What is a data center?

Data centers are the cloud.

They power everything that defines modern life,

from Zoom and in teams video calls to social media, self-driving cars, advanced manufacturing, advanced medical research and even killer apps like chat GPT.

That's Craig McKesson from T5 data centers.

But from the fact that Craig works at a global data center owner and operator, I wanted to speak to him because T5 runs data centres in Ireland.

And in Ireland, the growing number of data centres accounts for almost a fifth of electricity consumption in the country.

To put that into context, data centres in Ireland are using as much electricity as all households in the country's urban area.

And since Ireland is a pretty small country, it's roughly the size of the state of Indiana, data centers are placing pressure on its power grid. But since big tech companies like Facebook, Google, Microsoft and others have their

European headquarters there, and since those companies employ a lot of people, data centers are

there to stay. So, what's to be done? How can Ireland keep a valuable industry while keeping

the country's lights on full wattage?

From the BBC World Service, I'm Leanna Byrne, and this is Business Daily.

In this episode, we're going to take a look at data centers in Ireland, how the industry has grown,

and whether that growth is costing the country's power grid.

We'll also hear from a rare voice in this debate

is someone who actually runs a data centre company. So keep listening because the data

...