Meta Clonee data center, Clonee, Co. Meath

Meta's Clonee data center in Clonee, County Meath, Ireland, is an operating Meta campus whose first buildings were already running when the company announced two more in 2019. Meta says it has invested 1.4 billion euro in the Clonee campus in Meath, which it says supports more than 300 operational jobs and drew 1,500 skilled trade workers at the peak of construction.

In March 2019 Meta announced two new buildings at Clonee that would bring the facility to nearly 150,000 square meters, and said all its Clonee buildings would run on 100% renewable energy. Meta says three wind and solar projects it supports in Ireland are adding 219 megawatts of new renewable energy to the grid to match the data center's electricity use.

Clonee has also been the scene of a labour dispute. In October 2024 engineers in the Connect trade union called a 24-hour strike over a new four-week shift cycle that meant more weekend and night work, saying Meta had imposed it without agreement. The strike was deferred and the dispute referred to the Labour Court. "While we respect our employee's right of association, we do not engage with third party representative bodies," Meta said at the time. In March 2025 Meta said it was proposing to make a "small number" of roles redundant at Clonee; RTÉ reported that 14 roles were at risk.

The bigger question around Clonee is the grid. Ireland's 121 data centres use about one-fifth of the country's electricity, and almost all of them are in the congested Dublin-Meath area, The Irish Times reported in June 2026. The Commission for Regulation of Utilities said data centre demand grew from 5% of national electricity demand in 2015 to 22% in 2024 and is forecast to reach 31% by 2034. In December 2025 the CRU set new rules for data centres connecting to the grid: they must provide generation or storage to match their demand, meet at least 80% of annual demand with new renewable projects in Ireland, and be judged on whether their grid location is constrained. Friends of the Earth and two other groups have been granted leave to judicially review the State's data centre energy policy, with a hearing scheduled for April 2027.

Under the CRU's policy, any new or larger grid connection for a data centre in the Dublin-Meath area is assessed by the system operators EirGrid and ESB Networks, who must now publish where the network has spare capacity.