I have spent many decades studying how firms internationalize. I have read countless articles and books that try to answer why and how firms expand across borders, pursue the resources they do, how they balance local adaptation with global integration, mitigate risk, internationalize early, or quickly, in the pursuit of performance of one form or another.

Yet in the space of 18 months, the AI boom has rendered much of what we have studied (in extremely slow motion over decades) borderline meaningless. We study these multinationals, write about and map their social and environmental responsibilities, and almost overnight they have shown the world that the paradigms guiding strategic and responsible behavior don’t seem to mean anything. The same firms we theorize about are now laying off tens of thousands of workers, draining household electricity budgets, and depleting water supplies in already water-scarce regions, causing environmental destruction, all in the name of building infrastructure for a technology with intangible benefits and palpable costs and harm. And I find myself asking, more often than not:

Why do we care about MNEs?  

What has the incessant pursuit of firm performance actually led to, and who is paying for it?  

Ireland’s dependency on multinationals

Ireland is often considered a foreign direct investment success story. And there is a considerable gap between Ireland’s FDI image and the standard of daily living. Over 1,800 multinational firms now operate here, employing 312,400 people, roughly 11% of the employment base (IDA Ireland, 2025). Successive governments have treated this as vindication of an open-door policy: low corporate taxes, light touch regulation, generous subsidies, turning a blind eye to dubious labor practices and environmental harm.  

Ten firms contributed nearly 60% of total corporate tax receipts in 2024 (Cronin, 2026), but Apple and Microsoft together paid close to 40% of all corporate tax in the country that year (Irish Times, 2026). Foreign-owned multinationals as a whole accounted for 88% of net corporate tax receipts (Revenue Commissioners, 2025). IFAC Chair Seamus Coffey summarised this concentration as a significant risk, warning that Ireland’s fiscal position had become dependent on “the performance of two or three companies, or boardroom decisions of two or three companies, or a social media post from the President of the United States” (Murphy, 2026).

These are the firms whose European operations Ireland has spent decades courting, subsidising, and accommodating. They are also the firms now leading the AI buildout, cutting tens of thousands of jobs in the process, and whose data centers are consuming a fifth of the country’s electricity at half the price households pay.

The tech firms whose infrastructure underpins the AI boom have been laying off workers at scale. In Ireland alone, 20,300 jobs in the IT sector disappeared in the first three months of 2026, the largest job losses of any sector in the economy, with the number employed falling from 189,720 to just over 169,000 (McCashin, 2026). The vast majority were in computer programming and consultancy. In the week that these figures were published, Meta announced it was cutting up to 350 of its 1,800 Dublin staff, citing AI as a primary reason. The pattern is global: more than 142,000 US tech workers lost their jobs in the first five months of 2026 alone, as companies redirected payroll savings toward AI capital expenditure while posting record profits (TechTimes, 2026).

Then there is the electricity bill. Data centers consumed 22% of Ireland’s total electricity in 2024, more than all urban households. A Friends of the Earth Ireland report published in May 2026 found that Irish households paid an estimated €715 million extra in electricity costs between 2015 and 2023 as a direct result of data center demand on the grid (Fearon, 2026). Projections for the coming decade suggest a further €295 to €644 per household, cumulatively.

Dunning’s paradigm 2026

John Dunning’s eclectic paradigm is one of the foundational frameworks of international business scholarship. Firms internationalize by combining ownership advantages with location advantages and internalisation incentives. They go where the conditions are most favorable in terms of skilled labour, infrastructure, regulatory environments, and natural resources.

The tech firms building out AI infrastructure are following this logic, and the location advantages they are seeking increasingly include cheap land, generous subsidies, low corporate taxes, and abundant water. Or some combination of these. The problem is that these places offering cheap land and tax breaks are often impoverished and the communities see little long-term benefit and instead face long-term harm.

For example, India has 18% of the world’s population but only 4% of its freshwater. An S&P Global study cited by the BBC found that 60%-80% of India’s data centers will face high water stress in this decade (Inamdar, 2025). Data center water consumption in India, already 150 billion litres annually, is projected to more than double to 358 billion litres by 2030 (Outlook India, 2026), and its data center capacity to increase ninefold (Stavrou, 2025). In Mexico’s Querétaro region, data centres are drawing from supplies already contested by rural and indigenous communities, where Microsoft obtained a concession to extract 25 million litres a year from underground for just one of its data centre units, equivalent to 24% of the water allocated to the municipality for public use (Context News, 2024; Business and Human Rights Centre, 2024). In arid regions from the Gulf to sub-Saharan Africa, the pattern repeats.

This is Dunning’s paradigm in operation. The firms are rational actors pursuing location advantages. What the framework hasn’t accounted for is what gets extracted, depleted, or destroyed in the process and we haven’t questioned this critically enough.

Ask the right questions!

We have built sophisticated models of entry modes, ownership structures, and performance outcomes. We have produced decades of research on how multinationals create value and how they grow. Now we are finding out what happens when they grow as big as they are, and at whose expense. Everywhere we turn we see the uncritical adoption of AI. It’s happening in workplaces, and in universities using workplace adoption as justification to follow blindly, signalling to the next generation that it’s OK. We are enabling and minimizing the damage. It’s what corporations want. And policies are being developed without really addressing or even stopping to think briefly about the negative consequences. Environmental damage, labour displacement, community water access, and fiscal dependency are being quietly ignored or considered someone else’s problem.

These multinational firms are among the most powerful institutions on the planet, reshaping societies, energy systems, and water supplies in ways our frameworks have not kept pace with. It is time to hold them to account. That starts with those of us who study them being willing to say so!  And we should also be quite willing to teach this type of critical thinking to our students, instead of passively accepting AI use as the new normal. None of it is normal.  

References

Business and Human Rights Centre. (2024). Mexico: Data centre industry led by big tech raises concerns over water access to communities.

Context News. (2024). Thirsty data centres spring up in water-poor Mexican town.

Inamdar, N. (2025). India’s data centre boom confronts a looming water challenge. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgr417pwek7o

Stavrou, F.V. (2025). Data centers, energy, and the emerging market equation: A sustainability challenge. https://business.cornell.edu/article/2025/05/sustainability-challenge/

Cronin, B. (2026, February 19). More concentration, more risk: Three firms account for almost half of Ireland’s corporation tax revenues. Irish Fiscal Advisory Council.

Fearon, S. (2026). The cost of data centres: Modelling the household electricity costs of Ireland’s data centre sector. Friends of the Earth Ireland.

IDA Ireland. (2025). Strength and resilience of FDI propels growth, innovation, and competitiveness.

Irish Times. (2026, February 19). US firms Apple, Microsoft and Eli Lilly paid almost 50% of State’s corporate tax in 2024.

McCashin, C. (2026, May 22). 20,300 jobs lost in Ireland’s tech industry in first 3 months of the year. Business Plus.

Murphy, D. (2026, February 19). Almost half of corporation tax paid by three multinationals, says fiscal watchdog.

Outlook India. (2026, February 19). AI Impact Summit 2026: Water stress from data centres a cause for concern.

Revenue Commissioners. (2025). Corporation tax: 2024 payments and 2023 returns.

TechTimes. (2026, May 29). Tech layoffs reach 142,000 in 2026: Profitable companies cut jobs to fund $700B AI infrastructure.