Apple Athenry data center, Athenry, County Galway

Apple's planned €850 million data center at Derrydonnell Woods near Athenry, County Galway, Ireland, will not be built: Apple dropped it in 2018, and in June 2022 the High Court quashed the extension of its planning permission, which has now expired. Reviving the data center would take a completely new planning application, RTÉ reported. The Supreme Court dismissed objectors' challenges in 2019, but by then Apple had already built a data center in Denmark instead, according to Friends of the Irish Environment.

Apple bought the roughly 500-acre site for around $15 million in 2014, a fraction of the €850 million it said the finished data center would cost, DCD reported. Although Galway County Council cleared its plans, appeals kept taking the case to An Bord Pleanála and the courts. Apple first won permission in 2016 but decided in 2018 not to proceed after the delays.

In June 2021, still seeking a buyer, Apple applied to extend its planning permission to November 2026. The council granted a five-year extension that August, but resident Allan Daly and the group Eco-Advocacy challenged it in the High Court, arguing the council had not assessed the plan's cumulative impact under EU law, and the court quashed it with the council's and the State's consent. "The EU legislation specifically requires an assessment of other plans or projects," said Kieran Cummins, Eco-Advocacy's director.

Sinn Féin's Louis O'Hara has called for the State to buy the site for start-up businesses, saying it should not be left "lying idle." Athenry is still cited as an early example of successful local resistance to data centers in Ireland, where they used 23 percent of the country's electricity in 2025.