Amazon is quietly pulling pieces of its online store’s infrastructure out of Ireland. The reason isn’t strategy in the usual corporate sense. It’s electricity.
Internal documents reviewed by Business Insider describe a multiyear Amazon effort called Region Flex, built around spreading workloads across more AWS regions instead of leaning so heavily on a few large ones. Dublin is losing ground in that shift. Some of the traffic is reportedly headed to Frankfurt and to Zaragoza, Spain.
Amazon confirmed Region Flex is real but told Business Insider that some details in the documents, including timelines, don’t match its current plans anymore.
The numbers from Ireland make the pressure obvious. Data centres there used 7,663 gigawatt-hours of electricity in 2025, per the Central Statistics Office, up 10% year over year. That’s 23% of the country’s metered electricity use now, compared with just 5% a decade ago.
Irish regulators tightened the rules in December 2025. New data centres seeking grid connections now have to bring their own generation or storage capacity, matched to their maximum draw, and cover at least 80% of annual demand through new Irish renewable projects within six years.
This kind of move isn’t free for Amazon either. Spreading workloads across more regions adds data transfer fees, more monitoring, and generally less efficient hosting than keeping everything in one place. Business Insider reported that some services shifted out of Dublin already cost more to run.
Amazon shows no sign of pulling back on spending overall. CEO Andy Jassy told investors in July that AWS will keep adding capacity, and the company raised its 2026 spending forecast from $200 billion to $220 billion, citing higher memory costs among other factors. Jassy also said AWS remains on pace to double its power capacity by the end of 2027 versus 2025 levels.
Ireland’s grid operator, EirGrid, expects the demand to keep climbing too, from 9.4 terawatt-hours this year to 14.6 terawatt-hours by 2034, nearly a third of the country’s total electricity use.
Amazon isn’t moving its infrastructure because it wants to. It’s moving because, in parts of Ireland, the power to run it simply isn’t there.
