In a village 21 miles north of Edinburgh, a real estate consultancy plans to build a datacentre larger than the village itself – 35 metres high, with an area larger than 100 football pitches. Billed as the second-biggest datacentre in the world, the development in Auchertool, Fife, has attracted 1,600 objections. In a matter of weeks, as the Scottish parliament comes back into session, the growing opposition could pose a challenge to Britain’s AI strategy.
They will be expecting action.” For months, UK officials have been encouraging would-be datacentre developers to consider Scotland. In April, Fintan Slye, the chief executive of the UK’s National Energy System Operator (Neso), told a London audience to look north: “If in the audience you have a big datacentre and you want to go to Scotland, please come talk to me, we will help you,” he said. But Scotland, it turns out, isn’t having it.
The proposal for Auchtertool is a behemoth: drawings show the 600MW datacentre towering over the village, dwarfing old stone houses and blocking the view of fields and forests. This week, Scotland’s minister for public finance issued a new set of directions to regulate datacentres in the country. The first of these requires planning authorities to notify the government when they receive an application for a datacentre larger than 50MW – in other words, anything more than a twelfth of the size of Auchtertool.
The minister has also required that certain datacentres, including Auchtertool, submit an environmental impact assessment. Their developers had previously argued that they were exempt. In some senses, these are “obvious, bare-minimum” rules, said Jones.
They mean that Scotland is starting to closely follow developments that stand to drastically reshape the landscape and resource consumption of the entire country. The fact that giant datacentres can currently be built across Britain with little strategy and without government knowledge is a feature of an old and idiosyncratic planning regime; no one foresaw that giant tech companies would wish to litter the world with buildings the size of large monuments. But these restrictions are just the start.
The Scottish parliament will return at the end of this month. Three days after the session commences, in early September, campaigners plan a massive demonstration against datacentres in Edinburgh. That demonstration will aim higher.
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