Ireland may sit comfortably inside Europe’s top tier for cloud computing adoption, but new pan-European data has exposed an awkward subplot beneath the headline ranking: almost three in ten Irish businesses are still operating without cloud infrastructure, even as cloud becomes a non-negotiable foundation for artificial intelligence deployment.
The new findings place Ireland fourth on the continent for cloud uptake, with 73.04% of Irish businesses now paying for cloud computing services. That might put the country ahead of most of its European peers but it still leaves 26.96% of Irish firms outside the cloud entirely, a meaningful slice of the economy given Ireland’s reputation as one of Europe’s most advanced technology hubs.
The analysis, which was compiled by cloud computing specialist Colibri Digital based on Eurostat’s annual survey on ICT usage and e-commerce in enterprises, also lays bare a persistent divide by company size. Across the EU, 84.67% of large enterprises now use paid cloud services. That figure falls to 66.78% for medium-sized businesses, and to just 49.30% for small businesses, meaning roughly half of Europe’s smallest firms remain on the wrong side of the cloud computing divide.
The commercial stakes are no longer theoretical. Separate analysis from the UK’s Office for National Statistics, drawn from its Management and Expectations Survey published in March 2025, found that businesses adopting cloud computing see an average of 12% higher turnover per worker compared with non-adopters, even after controlling for management quality and other firm characteristics. The cloud, in other words, is now a measurable lever on productivity rather than simply a line item on the IT budget.
Ben Wheeler, Head of Cloud Engineering at Colibri Digital, said: “Ireland’s tech sector is among the most advanced in Europe, but these figures are a reminder that cloud adoption isn’t uniform across the whole economy. When almost a third of Irish businesses are still operating without cloud infrastructure, that’s a meaningful drag on productivity and competitiveness. While we refer to it as a cloud computing divide, it’s increasingly going to become a productivity divide, a competitiveness divide, and an AI-readiness divide. You can’t run production-grade AI on infrastructure that was designed for a pre-cloud world.”
Dig beneath the headline adoption numbers and a second-order story emerges, this time around cloud maturity. Of all European businesses paying for cloud services, 77.53% are buying sophisticated offerings such as platform-as-a-service, database hosting and cloud security. Roughly one in ten, however, are still using only the most basic services, such as email and file storage, with a further 10.79% sitting somewhere in between.
Ireland fares well on this measure, but not as well as its top-four adoption ranking might suggest. Some 46.92% of Irish enterprises are using sophisticated cloud services, comfortably above the EU average of 40.89%. The wrinkle is at the top of the maturity stack: only 18.52% of Irish cloud users have adopted platform-as-a-service tools for application development and deployment, pointing to limited uptake of the more advanced capabilities that underpin AI and data-intensive workloads.
That distinction matters enormously for the next wave of enterprise technology. The same ONS research found that 91% of firms currently using AI also use cloud computing, confirming what most chief technology officers already suspect: cloud is, to all intents and purposes, a prerequisite for serious AI deployment. Businesses that have not yet made the shift are not simply behind on infrastructure. They are behind on the foundations needed to compete in an AI-first economy.
Colibri Digital’s Ben Wheeler added: “If you’re an Irish business leader looking at your AI strategy in 2026 and you haven’t sorted out your cloud infrastructure, you’re starting at the wrong place. The businesses we work with that get the most from AI investments aren’t necessarily the ones with the most sophisticated models. They’re the ones with clean, accessible data underpinned by resilient cloud architecture. It’s the foundation that determines what’s possible above it.”
For the roughly 27% of Irish businesses still without cloud services, the ONS productivity figures are a sobering benchmark of what the divide is already costing them. A 12% shortfall in turnover per worker is a heavy tax to pay year after year, and as AI adoption accelerates among cloud-ready competitors, the gap looks set to widen rather than narrow.
Ireland’s place near the top of the European table is, in that sense, a story with two endings. The country has built one of the continent’s most cloud-ready economies, yet a substantial minority of its businesses are still operating outside it. Closing that remaining gap, and pushing more firms into the higher-value platform services that AI depends on, will determine whether Ireland’s tech reputation translates into broad-based productivity gains over the rest of the decade.
