Global Experiences That the U.S. Anti-Data-Center Movement Can Learn From: From Ireland’s Grid Crisis to New Zealand’s Community AI Initiatives

In his book “Hyper-Scale,” Paris Marx traces the history of resistance within global data centers, noting that Ireland imposed a ban due to grid capacity saturation, prompting companies to build their own gas-fired power plants; meanwhile, New Zealand is exploring a non-exploitative AI pathway by leveraging local cloud services to support Māori-language speech recognition; and the wave of opposition currently sweeping the United States is, in fact, a reenactment of long‑foreseen global tensions.