Bloomberg, the largest Financial media outlet in the world has published an investigation into the proposed AI Pathfinder 1GW hyperscale data centre in Irvine.
Key takeaways from the article
- British real estate investor Martin Bellamy unveiled a proposal to develop a £15 billion data center in Scotland that would be one of Europe’s largest computing facilities devoted to artificial intelligence.
- The project’s site remains a patch of land overgrown with weeds, and Bellamy’s company, AI Pathfinder, has crumbled, mired in acrimonious lawsuits, and lost large portions of its staff.
- The Scottish government is considering freezing all new data center applications due to potential impact on energy resources, and locals see no indication of plans for development, or indeed the promised investment and jobs, at the proposed site.
We took Bloomberg reporter Laura Avetisyan to the site in Irvine back in May and they have been working on the story since. The article focuses on the travails of the company which said it would build the 1GW facility in Irvine and claiming they would bring £15bn to Ayrshire. North Ayrshire Council leader Tony Gurney, who had put out enthusiastic quotes in a council press release welcoming the project declined Bloomberg’s invitation to comment.
From our point of view, we have never seen any evidence that this development was ever more than a press release. There has been no planning application, not even a Planning Application Notification, which would take only a few minutes to write as they are so short and include such limited information. When we went to the site I spotted a ‘for sale’ sign for the land it was supposed to be built on (and operational by 2026…). I considered not putting it on our data centre map as I felt it didn’t meet the bar for being a credible investment that may actually happen. However, North Ayrshire council evidently considered it a viable project so I put it on.
It goes without saying that companies should be more responsible when putting out gushing press releases about large amounts of money and jobs they will bring to areas that desperately need the investment. However, it is also up to our councils, and elected members to have a bit of skepticism when it comes to investments like this where there is absolutely no substance behind them.
video of the site may 2026