Ireland has a large pool of AI engineers but produces very little frontier machine learning research, ranking last among comparable small nations in top-venue papers per capita. I argue that this gap is partly due to the lack of national research computing since Kay was decommissioned, and that the planned CASPIr supercomputer is too modest and not AI-optimised enough to close it.

An episode on how the Irish State became the anchor customer for a 1998 transatlantic fibre cable, securing the international bandwidth that helped attract technology firms to Ireland. It features Brendan Tuohy, Secretary General of the Department of Communications, Marine and Natural Resources (2000–2007). I discuss the HPC and GPU infrastructure the Irish AI research community will need over the coming decade.