New Amazon Cable Shows Ireland's AI Infrastructure Ambitions—and Vulnerabilities

A new Amazon transatlantic fiber optic cable has become a symbol of Ireland's technological ambitions — and at the same time exposed risks associated with the country's chronically low defense spending, writes Bloomberg.

Why Ireland is important for AI infrastructure

Ireland has attracted data centers from the world's largest tech companies — Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft — for decades thanks to its low corporate tax rate, EU membership, and English-speaking environment. With AI growth, demand for computing power in the country has surged sharply: by various estimates, data centers already consume about one-fifth of all Ireland's electricity, and the country's network operator EirGrid has repeatedly warned about limitations on connecting new facilities in the Dublin area.

• A new cable has been laid by Amazon across the Atlantic
• Ireland is one of Europe's key hubs for data centers of tech giants
• Data centers already consume a significant share of the country's electricity, estimated at about one-fifth
• Ireland's defense spending is chronically lower than that of its EU neighbors

What is the risk to security

Subsea cables carry the overwhelming majority of the world's internet and cloud traffic, including data for training and running AI systems, and are physically extremely vulnerable. In recent years, there have been more cases of subsea cable damage in the Baltic Sea, which investigators linked to so-called shadow fleet vessels. Ireland, meanwhile, has no full-fledged naval or air forces to protect its own waters and airspace — the country has historically maintained neutrality and spends one of the lowest shares of GDP on defense in Western Europe, and patrols over part of its airspace have effectively been conducted by neighboring states for years.

How this relates to AI, not just the internet

Transatlantic cables like Amazon's new route are not just a "pipe" for web traffic: they carry data synchronization between data centers, training and servicing of models for clients on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as cloud AI service traffic, which critically depends on low latency. The more AI computing power is concentrated in Ireland, the more expensive any communication failure becomes — and the more visible the gap between the country's digital ambitions and its ability to physically protect those ambitions.

What Amazon has to do with it

Amazon itself is not a bystander in this situation but one of the main builders of Irish digital infrastructure: AWS, the company's cloud division, has for many years maintained one of Europe's largest data center clusters in the Dublin region, serving clients with AI workloads among others. The new cable directly increases bandwidth specifically for traffic between these facilities and the USA — in other words, it works toward further increasing Ireland's dependence on the company as an anchor technology investor.

What this means

The more global AI infrastructure depends on a few key hubs like Ireland, the more urgent the question of physical protection of the cables and data centers that ensure its operation becomes.