Curious what the collective brain capacity of Ireland actually is?
Start from the basics:
An average adult burns 2200–3000 kcal/day (men) or 1800–2400 kcal/day (women).
That’s roughly 100 W total body power (24-hour average).
The brain takes a flat ~20 W of that, regardless of sex or size.
Of those 20 W, only 1–5 W supports conscious reasoning and deliberate computation. The rest runs vision, balance, heartbeat, memory maintenance, etc.
Ireland’s population: ~5.3 million.
Upper estimate (5 W/person conscious): 5.3 M × 5 W = 26.5 MW nationwide.
Lower (1 W/person): 5.3 MW.
Realistic range for deliberate thinking: 5–27 MW total.
Now the machines:
Ireland’s ~90 hyperscale data centres pull ~1.3 GW (1,300 MW) for IT load alone (2024–2025 figures).
That’s 48–260× more electricity than the entire country’s conscious-thinking budget.
Efficiency comparison:
- Human conscious slice: 0.3–3 petaFLOPS from 5–27 MW → 0.01–0.6 GFLOPS/watt
- Irish data-centre fleet (2024–2025 GPUs): 2–6 exaFLOPS from 1.3 GW → 1.5–4.6 GFLOPS/watt
(FLOP = one floating-point operation, e.g. adding/multiplying decimals).
So the machines deliver 1000–20 000× the raw throughput and 100–500× better performance per watt than the deliberate-thinking portion of every Irish brain combined.
Rough numbers, wide ranges, but the gap is real and widening fast.
A few square kilometres of server halls now out-compute and out-efficiency the focused minds of 5.3 million people 😀
