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 😀