A few years ago I was reading a recruitment report and was surprised to learn that Ireland is a large source of data scientists, so it’s no surprise really

I don’t really see the link between data scientists and datacentres, or even AI researchers and datacentres.

The data scientists aren’t the ones working in the data centres. There’s no real advantage to having the data they’re working on next door unless it’s extremely lag sensitive.

Local proximity of a datacentre is good for fintech, Netflix and gaming servers.

Yep. IDA's services FDI model helped attract much of the tech scene that exists in Ireland today. In the 1990s and 2000s no one would have expected Ireland to become the tech hub it is today without the IDA's foresightedness.