Scottish communities force SNP to rethink its AI data centre plans

The Scottish National Party (SNP) has announced plans to support a pause on all new AI data centre developments, the National has revealed.

The move comes after many months of community protests against proposed sites across the country. There has been both grassroots and political pushback, including from several MSPs from various parties.

The SNP-run government of Scotland will join calls from the Scottish Greens to support a moratorium on AI data centre developments. The moratorium will be accepted following a vote by the SNP’s National Council, a key decision-making body in the party’s organisation.

The two parties hold a clear majority in Holyrood, so if a moratorium is formally proposed, it would probably pass. It would also likely be supported by various figures from Labour, Tories, Lib-Dems and Reform UK. All political colours have raised concerns about data centre projects in their areas.

Pausing for people and planet

The support for a ban on AI centres comes after two councils, Edinburgh and East Ayrshire, made calls for the Scottish Government to implement a moratorium.

There have been wide-ranging concerns across Scotland‘s local communities around the planned developments. These are due to the potentially massive scale of energy, water and land consumption.

There is currently a 10-year wait for most large developments to connect to the grid. To avoid this, data centre developers suggest that they’ll use on-site generation to power the huge computing servers. However, this has been outed largely as a lie to secure lucrative contracts and so boost investment.

Tasha Marsden is one of the organisers of the campaign against a 300MW data centre in Larbert, near Falkirk. Marsden told the National that she remains “sceptical” until “promises are put into action”.

The community backlash on hyper-scale AI data centre proposals has given the government whiplash. I think the scale of opposition from the public is now impossible for those in Holyrood to ignore.

It’s clear that concerns have echoed beyond community halls and are now being reverberated at the top of government. Cross-party support for pressing the pause button on current proposals in the pipeline has been paramount to achieving that.

Commenting on the new decision, Scottish Green MSP and former party co-leader Patrick Harvie spoke out. He said it was a positive step by the party, but must now be acted upon through the Scottish Government:

This is an important step by the SNP’s National Council, and I hope the Scottish Government now acts on it. I know there are SNP MSPs who share our concerns about the Big Tech land grab …

Scotland is facing a wave of hyperscale data centre applications that could have profound consequences for our energy system, our environment and our communities.

The Scottish Government’s tone is beginning to shift. I hope that these reports will encourage them to go further and faster in putting a stop to the speculative applications that we are seeing.

AI data centres plan causes uproar across Scotland

Spectre of data doom haunts Scotland

The Canary previously reported on AI data centres planned across Scotland and the widespread public backlash they attract. It’s safe to say that there’s little public consent for the massive projects.

In June, Scotland’s countryside charity ARPS published an interactive map illustrating where data centres are earmarked for. The charity compiled the data over growing concerns about the impact of the data units on electricity prices, communities and the environment.

Calling for a moratorium — now successfully — back in June, ARPS spokesperson Kat Jones said:

Hyperscale data centres are some of the biggest buildings in the world and this is why we are seeing them being proposed mainly on greenbelt and Greenfield sites.

Their main requirements are large quantities of land and access to huge amounts of electricity and water. These buildings are huge, but the amount of energy they use is absolutely off the scale.

Jones didn’t hold back on stating the case clearly.

This is an inconceivable amount of energy that Scotland is being asked to divert to the use of hyperscale AI data centres, which will enrich a few billionaires in Silicon valley at the expense of the Scottish consumer.

No discussion on energy in Scotland can ignore the impact that these data centres would have on our electricity grid and energy prices.

We are calling for a moratorium to get some proper planning and policies in place.

Campaigners are rightly concerned about rising energy prices. In the US, areas with data centres have soared up to 267% according to Bloomberg data.

UK Government lied about ‘renewable’ Scottish data centre plans

UK Government lied about Scottish AI data centres

Yesterday the Canary reported that the UK government and at least two corporations were caught lying about their construction plans for data centres in Lanarkshire.

Government plans for a supposedly “renewable” multi-billion pound data centre project in Lanarkshire entirely misrepresented their actual environmental and economic impacts. The data complex, valued at £8.2bn and touted as being energy self-sufficient, was unfeasible from the start.

Built jointly by US corporation CoreWeave and Scottish data firm DataVita, the complex was supposed to power itself entirely by 2030. However, internal correspondence documents obtained through Freedom of Information (FOI) requests show that the site had an “issue” with “power provision” all along.

Government spokespeople and the private companies publicly promised that the Lanarkshire site would produce 1GW of “new energy infrastructure”. However, the two entities involved have privately acknowledged that this entire promise was bogus and unattainable.

Ultimately, it’s all destructive extraction, corporate bluff, billionaire-funded marketing, and an impending economic bubble-pop. These are the fundamental lies at play, behind the more immediate lies in Lanarkshire.

Featured image via the Canary