Scotland’s governing party voted this month to freeze every new data centre project in the country. The trigger was reporting that found its flagship green AI complex in Lanarkshire cannot fit the renewable power it promised onto the land it was actually given.
The SNP’s National Council motion now sits with the Scottish government, and with the Scottish Greens already backing a moratorium, the two parties command enough votes at Holyrood to make it stick. At stake is a pipeline of at least two dozen proposed sites that could, together, draw more electricity than Scotland currently uses at its winter peak.
The Land Math Behind a Broken Promise
The project at the centre of the row sits in Airdrie, North Lanarkshire. US cloud and AI infrastructure firm CoreWeave and DataVita, the Scottish firm building the site, unveiled an £8.2 billion complex in January, promising it would run entirely on on site renewables and be finished by 2030.
DataVita’s own announcement of the £1.5 billion renewable buildout put the figure at more than 1 gigawatt, split between 400 megawatts of solar and 800 megawatts of wind. That is roughly enough, on paper, to power 800,000 Scottish homes.
Guardian journalist Aisha Down found the planning paperwork tells a different story. DataVita’s applications cover roughly 2 square kilometres. Fitting 1 gigawatt of solar and wind onto a Scottish site typically takes somewhere between 40 and 100 square kilometres, 20 to 50 times what the company has actually applied to build on.
The 800 megawatts of promised wind power alone would exceed one and a half times the output of Whitelee, the UK’s largest onshore wind farm, which spreads across an area roughly half the size of Bristol. Government correspondence obtained under freedom of information law shows the Airdrie site will instead lean on Britain’s national grid, where new connection queues now run 8 to 10 years.
| Claim | What DataVita Promised | What the Paperwork Shows |
|---|---|---|
| Renewable capacity | More than 1 gigawatt (400MW solar, 800MW wind) | Planning applications cover about 2 square kilometres |
| Land needed for that output | Not addressed in the original pledge | An estimated 40 to 100 square kilometres, 20 to 50 times the permitted site |
| Power source by 2030 | Fully on site renewables | Grid connection now planned, with queues running 8 to 10 years |
| Completion date | 2030 | Reporting cites supply chain delays for the electrical components involved |
DataVita has not published a revised timeline. The gap between the pledge and the paperwork is what pushed the data centre question from a planning dispute into a national political fight.
Why Holyrood Moved Now
The SNP’s National Council passed its freeze motion earlier this month and sent it to the Scottish government. A council motion sets party policy, not government policy. Turning it into one needs a vote at Holyrood, and the SNP no longer needs Labour or the Conservatives to get there because the Scottish Greens already back a full moratorium.
Not everyone welcomes the shift. Scottish Financial Enterprise chief executive Sandy Begbie wrote in Scotland on Sunday that the plans had been “hijacked by politics, minority vested interests and false information.”
Governments elsewhere are having a version of the same argument. In Australia, the Albanese cabinet has split over a proposed copyright carve out tied to new data centre capacity, exposing the same tension between courting investment and answering to voters that Holyrood now faces.
Local pressure has been building for months regardless of what Edinburgh decides.
Two Dozen Projects, One Strained Grid
The Scottish Parliament Information Centre, the Parliament’s own research service known as SPICe, counted 22 proposed hyperscale sites this spring, with 16 already working through initial planning stages. By July, campaigners tracking the pipeline were citing at least 24 proposals, with a combined draw of up to 6,000 megawatts, more than one and a half times Scotland’s current peak electricity demand.
Two of those proposals, in Falkirk and Fife, would alone need about 900 megawatts between them, close to a quarter of that peak demand.
The pipeline spans old industrial Scotland as much as its glens.
- Ravenscraig in North Lanarkshire hosts a £3.9 billion proposal from developer Apatura on the site of the former steelworks.
- Greenock, in Inverclyde, is pitched by Sandy and James Easedale, two of Scotland’s richest men, on the site of IBM’s former electronics plant in the country’s most deprived town.
- Mossmorran in Fife has developers citing “available employment” after ExxonMobil closed its ethylene plant nearby.
- Stoic in Fife is a 600 megawatt filing from developer ILI Group.
Objections have piled up at council offices faster than most planning departments can log them. More than 3,000 formal objections were lodged against the Larbert site in Falkirk, and close to 5,000 people signed a petition against the proposal for Auchtertool in Fife.
How Much Water Will These Sites Drink?
Nobody fully agrees, and the two official answers contradict each other. Most Scottish data centres reportedly rely on open loop cooling that pulls continuously from the mains supply, while Scottish Water maintains that most sites use closed loop systems that recycle water with only minimal top ups.
Where the experts disagree:
- BBC reporting describes most Scottish sites running open loop systems that draw continuously on drinking quality mains water.
- Scottish Water says most facilities instead use closed loop systems, reusing water with only occasional top ups.
Neither side disputes that the underlying supply is tightening. That disagreement plays out against a national utility already bracing for shortfalls.
Did Scotland Already Solve This With Hydro Power?
Yes, once, and under public ownership rather than a private lease. Between 1944 and 1947 the state approved a wave of Highland hydroelectric schemes that flooded glens and moved households, but delivered electricity to the region on a scale it had never had before.
The North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board ran the system until Margaret Thatcher’s privatisation of the utilities in 1990. Fewer than one in ten Highland homes lacked electricity by 1960, a 35% drop in under a decade.
One prominent columnist invoked that history this month, arguing Scotland should “embrace” the new data centres given its water and energy resources.
The lost glens, the submerged homes, the irrevocably changed landscapes. The pain of such upheaval is almost unthinkable now. Yet it was the price of progress.
Kenny Farquharson wrote that in The Times, comparing today’s data centre boom directly to the hydro dams.
Public money paid for the dams. Private developers stand to collect on the data centres.
Tom Johnston ran that hydro board for years after a career at Westminster. In 1909, decades before taking the job, he wrote that so long as communities knelt “cap-in-hand before the Lord who owns the soil,” rural Scotland would stay in what he called a “spiritless mould.”
Data centre developers now hold long leases on Scotland’s wind and rain. Johnston’s ownership question has not gone away.
Westminster’s Bigger Bet
Any Holyrood freeze would only reach devolved planning powers. Westminster has taken a different route for England, designating data centres as critical national infrastructure, a status otherwise reserved for sectors like food, energy and emergency services.
That classification lets ministers pull major applications into a central planning process, taking the decision away from local council review, according to the House of Commons Library’s briefing on data centre planning policy. A separate analysis found the wider UK pipeline could double the country’s overall energy demand.
The lobbying behind that shift runs deep. Government ministers and senior civil servants met tech industry executives an average of six times a week during Labour’s first six months in office. Reporters later found that then technology secretary Peter Kyle asked a senior Google employee to “sense check” his department’s AI policy, and separately told Amazon he would “advocate” for the company before Britain’s competition regulator.
Amazon Web Services has since committed £8 billion to UK data centres over five years. Microsoft and Google are each building their first UK sites. AI linked stocks now account for more than a third of the US stock market, and the same three companies sit at the centre of Britain’s own buildout.
The UK argument mirrors one already playing out in the United States, where AI’s power demand has leaned on new gas plants and ageing coal capacity still running past retirement.
The National Energy System Operator is due to publish a draft Strategic Spatial Energy Plan for consultation in early 2027, with a final version by the end of that year. Scotland’s freeze motion will land on ministers’ desks well before then.
Frequently Asked Questions
What Did the SNP’s National Council Vote For?
The council backed a motion to freeze new data centre applications, a party position rather than a change in the law. It now goes to Scottish government ministers, who must decide whether the freeze covers only projects still waiting on a planning decision or reaches further, including sites that have already lodged applications but not yet broken ground.
How Much Power Could Scotland’s Full Data Centre Pipeline Use?
The same Scottish Parliament research service that counted the pipeline has put the potential draw at up to 86 times the country’s existing data centre capacity, a separate measure from the 6,000 megawatt, economy wide comparison campaigners cite. Both point to the same strain on a grid built for a smaller, steadier load.
Is Scotland Running Out of Water?
Not yet, but the trend line is against it. Scottish Water’s own forecasting shows that total demand across the country, from households and industry combined rather than data centres alone, could outstrip supply by 240 million litres a day by 2050 if nothing changes.
Could Westminster Overrule a Scottish Freeze?
Not directly. Planning powers over Scottish sites sit with Holyrood, and the critical national infrastructure designation changes the approval route mainly for projects in England. Grid connections and national energy strategy still run through UK wide bodies like the National Energy System Operator, which is one reason Scotland’s freeze would not fully insulate the country from Westminster’s wider AI buildout.
What Happens to Projects That Already Have Planning Permission?
They are expected to keep moving. The freeze motion, as drafted, targets undecided applications, meaning early phases of the Lanarkshire campus and any other already consented sites would likely proceed while newer entrants like Ravenscraig and Greenock wait for a ruling.
