🏗️ Faster infrastructure, DCC rebels sell and Stripe goes AI shopping

17 August 2026

Good morning. Infrastructure is getting faster, investors are testing takeover valuations, and housing supports are pulling in different directions. Abroad, Stripe is shopping in AI while German investment retreats from the US. Worth Your Time looks at why Ireland is slipping down the queue for AI data centres. Let’s get into it.

The Rotation has The Weekend Round-Up before the Top 5 today so you can catch up from the weekend before getting into today’s news…

Monday - The Weekend Round-Up…

The weekend left Irish business with money moving in several directions at once. Glanbia says it has a $1bn M&A war chest, with health, nutrition, flavours and functional ingredients in its sights, while Avolon agreed a sale-and-leaseback for up to seven Boeing 737s with India’s Akasa Air. At DCC, the takeover opposition became more complicated as Fidelity, Aviva, and Ninety One all reduced their stakes, with shares sold below the £65.25-a-share offer they had criticised. ICG’s €1.2bn management-backed takeover is facing the opposite pressure, with Pageant joining other minority shareholders in arguing €8 a share undervalues the ferry group ahead of the 28th of August vote.

Dublin property had its own shift. Indeed is seeking to sublet 72,470 sq. ft., roughly a third of its EMEA headquarters, adding to Workday reportedly seeking to sublet a fifth of its College Square space. Harvey Nichols’ Dundrum operation entered liquidation after years of losses, as Mike Ashley’s Frasers Group separately acquired the retailer’s UK parent after it fell into administration.

Abroad, the AI price war intensified as OpenAI and Anthropic cut model costs against cheaper Chinese rivals, Trump imposed tariffs of up to 100% on imported drones, and oil finished the week around 4% higher as the US-Iran conflict kept supply risk elevated.

1. Infrastructure Moves Up The Agenda. Ireland’s new critical-infrastructure regime is getting its first test, with the Eastern and Midlands water project among those being prioritised for faster decisions. Chambers Ireland says the wider problem is already costing the economy with grid, water, transport and planning delays are holding back investment and the benefits of the climate transition, while projected 2030 emissions reductions of 25.4% remain well short of the 51% target. Faster decision making is important, but equally so is getting them right.

2. Kingspan Keeps Winning As DCC Rebels Sell. Kingspan topped the ISEQ for a second week, rising 5.5% to €101.40 after its BMC and Argentina deals. At DCC, investors including Fidelity, Aviva and Ninety One have reduced stakes at prices below the £65.25 takeover offer they criticised. That does not mean they now support the bid, however, selling below it makes the original argument that £65.25 undervalues DCC considerably more difficult to prove.

3. Housing Support Is Pulling In Two Directions. The chief of the consortium building out the Glass Bottle site, Lioncor's Marcus Ryan says cutting VAT on new apartments from 13.5% to 9% has helped turn developments from waiting into building, and wants the measure considered for wider use. At the same time almost half of Help to Buy applicants receive no support despite the scheme costing the Government €1.5 billion as of May 2026. Government is trying to make homes viable for developers and affordable for buyers. Those are related problems but clearly not the same one.

4. The Central Bank's Cost Problem Is Being Broken Down. The Central Bank spent more than €54m on external consultants between 2023 and 2025, including €20.2m last year, even as Governor Gabriel Makhlouf targets €75m in savings by 2030. Separately, the planned relocation of its cash centre is running into construction-cost inflation and contractor shortages. Design validation is due to begin by year-end, but CBI says the project timetable will have to be reworked once procurement is complete, with possible implications for the budget. Cost control is increasingly becoming an internal project as well as a supervisory message.

5. FDI Is Still Doing A Lot Of The Work. IDA Ireland recorded 190 investments and 10,410 planned jobs in the first half of 2026, underlining how much of Ireland’s growth and tax base still rests on foreign investment. That matters as gross voted Government spending reached €54.4bn by the end of June, up 6.9% year-on-year, faster than tax-revenue growth of 4.8%. FDI continues to deliver for the exchequer, but the expanding spending base leaves less room for it to change.

Stripe has reportedly agreed to acquire AI platform OpenRouter for more than $7bn, although the company is calling the report speculation and the final price could still change. The Collisons are also back in talks with Advent and PayPal over a potentially higher offer than their earlier $53bn approach. German companies cut US investment by nearly two-thirds year-on-year to €4.3bn in the first half, the lowest since 2023, as Trump-era policy uncertainty weighed on spending. Middle East disruption is reaching factories too, with Volkswagen, Stellantis and Toyota seeking alternative motor-oil supplies after inventories ran down. All while 53% of US voters now say their finances have worsened since Trump returned to office. Deals continue to move but so do the risks around them.

Tech & AI

Anthropic has formed Theseus Infrastructure with Macquarie Asset Management and Singapore’s GIC to develop AI data centres, initially in the US. Macquarie and GIC will provide the bulk of the equity for individual projects, while Anthropic has committed to covering consumer electricity price increases caused by the facilities. No overall investment figure was disclosed, but the structure shows how much outside capital is now being pulled into the computing capacity behind frontier models.

The Irish angle is increasingly about deployment. Ryanair has signed a five-year Google Cloud partnership covering its 35,000 staff, with Gemini set to support areas including crew logistics, automated decision-making and corporate workflows. Irish sports-tech company Kitman Labs has meanwhile landed its second multimillion-dollar US soccer deal in less than two months. Its latest agreement will put its data platform across the United Premier Soccer League, which has more than 900 clubs and 40,000 players.

Investors are also starting to demand numbers from the boom. Cisco forecast $7.5bn in AI-related sales for its 2027 financial year after recording $9.3bn in AI-related orders over the previous year. Its shares fell more than 9% after the forecast disappointed investors, even as analysts questioned whether Cisco was being too conservative about the opportunity.

The next phase of the AI cycle is becoming easier to measure as it turns to more tangible questions like who is financing the infrastructure, who is actually deploying the technology and, increasingly, what revenue the investments can produce.

In Tuesday’s Tá, the Sector Spotlight will be Legal & Regulatory.

Career advice got oddly specific this weekend with the Business Post telling that four Leinster appearances can apparently earn you the “former Leinster player” tag for life in its pages and beyond, while speaking Irish and doing a law degree should have you a shoo-in for a Brussels job and its more obscure debates.

Irish sport had a better weekend still as Ellen Walshe struck gold twice at the European Aquatics Championships, while Mona McSharry added bronze bringing the medal total to 5. In Birmingham, Kate O’Connor won European heptathlon gold and Mark English took 800m gold as Ireland collected four athletics medals. Huge congratulations to both Irish teams on massive results!

The Read – Business Post (Requires Free Account) – ‘Irish Projects Are Falling To The Bottom': Ireland Overlooked In Global AI Data Centre Race

The piece explains why Ireland is largely missing the AI data centre wave despite its cloud-era success. Gigafactories and inference centres demand far higher power density than traditional cloud racks, and Ireland's grid constraints, Dublin development limits and new on-site generation rules are pushing developers elsewhere. Bitpower's David McAuley estimates €12.8 billion of committed Irish data centre investment is now at risk, while DC Byte and Equinix Ireland describe hyperscalers looking to the Nordics instead. Link: ‘Irish Projects Are Falling To The Bottom': Ireland Overlooked In Global AI Data Centre Race  

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