In this briefing – we explain the scale of data centres coming to Scotland, the impacts of hyperscale data centres on the environment, Scottish Policy around data centres, and what we can do about it.

Hyperscale Data centers use huge amounts of energy

The data centres being proposed in Scotland and the UK are absolutely huge, with energy demands of 200-1000 MW. The 1000 MW site proposed in Chapelcross, Annan would require energy the equivalent of a quarter of the entire peak demand of Scotland. It would take Whitelees Windfarm, the largest onshore wind farm in the UK, 8 years to generate the energy to power this site for just one year.

APRS have calculated from looking through Scotland’s planning portals that there is around 7150 MW of data centre energy demand currently in the planning system and in pre-planning, with three additional hyperscale data centres proposed, which are yet to enter planning. This dwarfs Scotland’s peak winter electricity demand which is around 4000 MW. 

This is a massive step change from the size of data centres we currently have in Scotland and the UK.  

A Freedom of Information Request  to Scottish Enterprise from March 2025 outlines that, in 2024, there were 11 data centres in Scotland as of June 2024, with a total capacity of around 10MW. A FoI to the UK Government estimated Scottish data centre capacity to be 30MW in 2024.

Total data centre capacity in the UK was estimated to be 1.6 GW in 2024 with around 400 data centres, according to DataMap. A 2024 industry report estimating average size of a facility in 2024 was 5-7MW. 

This means that the hyperscale data centres now in planning in Scotland are two orders of magnitude (ie 100x) bigger than existing data centres.

The largest data centre operating in the UK in 2024 was VIRTUS London5 in Slough at 90 MW (information from June 2025). Much larger ones are now in planning and construction in England and Wales.

Data centres at the scale of current facilities serving businesses and cloud computing (which we believe are on average 1-5MW), and research supercomputers, such as the Edinburgh University supercomputer, which is the largest publicly owned data centre in the UK (39MW) are not in our sights. This is about the hyperscale and AI data centres which are currently being proposed for Scotland- the smallest of which is 200MW and the largest 1000MW- and will be used for training large language model AI and for AI Inference.

Up until now data centres clustered around financial centres and the biggest capital cities to take advantage of low ‘latency’ (time lag in data transfer) to do do financial transactions and other business operations – hence the cluster near London is the second biggest in the world. However AI training and inference mean that latency is not such an issue and so now Scotland is becoming a desirable spot for hyperscale AI data centres due to cheap land, and a cool climate.

The exponential increase in size of and demand for data centres is due to the energy needed to train and run AI data centres 

The rapid growth in data centre demand is overwhelmingly driven by the intensive computational and power requirements of AI, specifically for training large language models (LLMs) and deploying AI-powered applications.

Data centres need a constant supply of energy 24/7 

They cannot power up and down and need constant power. This means they cannot run solely on renewable energy because when the wind is not blowing they need to important energy from the grid, and this is highly likely to be produced by fossil fuels.

Many data centres are building batteries on-site, but these are generally designed to store energy for a maximum of four hours – most have just two hours of storage. This could bridge the times of day when prices peak (around teatime) but they will not cover energy requirements for the hours and days when there is a lack of wind. 

Data centres will make it far harder to meet our energy targets for renewables. With Torness nuclear power station, which gives a constant baseload of 1.12GW, due to close in 2028, now is precisely the wrong time to be adding extremely high and constant energy demand into our system.

Data centre Infrastructure has caused problems with the grid, power shortages and huge energy cost increases for domestic customers. 

In places that have built a lot of data infrastructure, they are experiencing problems with power, with an energy crisis in America, the prospects of rolling blackouts for millions of customers in 17 US states, spikes in energy costs in Ireland companies turning to fossil fuel generation. For example Ireland has had such problems with power demand from data centres, they have put in place a three-year moratorium in Dublin (recently lifted). Consumers have been directly subsidising data centres energy costs and there have been warnings of sharp energy price increases for consumers due to expensive new energy infrastructure needing to be built for data centres.

Places with data centres are not able to meet their climate targets 

In Ireland, where 22% of the country’s energy was used by data centres in 2024 (50% in Dublin), electricity consumption by data centres increased by 32% between 2020 and 2021. Data centres are threatening the country’s climate commitments and renewable energy which should have displaced fossil fuel use, as per their projections, is being diverted to serving data centres.  

In the US, where the grid is under huge strain in states with data centres, they are building their own infrastructure for energy, called the ‘bring your own power’ model. This is mainly gas turbine powerstations, the new Meta Data Centre in Louisiana, famous for being the size of Manhattan, will require three onsite gas power stations to produce the energy to run it. A shortage of gas turbines means that some data centres have employed jet engines to produce the power they need and stock of FTAI, a jet engine repair company, soared when it announced a new division, dedicated specifically to converting jet engines into turbines for use in electrical power generation.

In Virginia, the state is proposing to exempt data centres from air quality regulations to allow for emergency diesel generators to provide power during peak summer energy usage. They say this is to manage grid instability issues caused by power demand from the large number of data centres. 

Data centres bring extremely low numbers of jobs. 

Data centres rely heavily on automation, meaning they typically create relatively small numbers of direct jobs. Analysis of large public grants to create jobs through data centres in Washington seems to have produced little effect on jobs. An article in Forbes notes that data centres are better understood as infrastructure projects, similar to roads or utilities, rather than as sources of large numbers of permanent jobs and says ‘says ‘Data centers not only fail to create jobs in significant numbers, they are huge drains on local infrastructure’.

The huge new Stargate (OpenAI) facility in Texas will employ 100 full time workers, a fraction of the number who will work in a similar size space if it were a manufacturing facility or even a warehouse.  The world’s largest data centre planned, Meta’s 2.5-5GW facility in Louisiana will only create 500 permanent jobs, but will require three onsite gas power stations to produce the energy to run it.

TechUK has estimated employment at UK data centres based on information provided by two data centre operators, who reported staffing levels of between 20 and 88 FTE roles per site.

Some commentators have raised concerns about how job figures are presented. For example, a 2024 government announcement claimed that a proposed £10 billion data centre campus in Northumberland would support 4,000 jobs, but later clarification revealed that this total included 1,200 construction roles and 2,700 indirect and induced jobs, meaning the data centre itself would only directly employ 100 people. Planning documents for the site suggest that it would create up to 400 permanent on-site jobs. 

It is also important to look at the opportunity costs of a datacentre for local employment. If a data centre is built on a site, then this potentially displaces an alternative business setting up which is likely to employ far more people. We are also seeing the amount of energy which data centres demand stifling other industries, for example, house building. Three boroughs in London have had to constrain house building for ten years due to a lack of grid capacity to connect new homes due to data centres in the area. 

Hyper scale data centres have an enormous footprint and are a serious threat to our countryside

The data centres coming through Scotland’s planning portals cover extremely large areas – the sites are upwards of 30-50 hectares and some considerably larger than that. 12 of the 16 that APRS have found in planning portals are on Green Belt, green field and farmland.

Data Centres are precisely the worst use for Scotland’s land, whether in rural or urban areas. As the Wall Street Journal reported, quoting Chief executive of data-center operator Patmos Hosting, John Johnson, “Data centers have rightly earned a dismal reputation of creating the lowest number of jobs per square foot in their facilities” 

Data centres need fossil fuel backup energy supplies.

Because they need to operate 24/7 without a break in power, data centres have dual power feeds to reduce the chance of downtime, however they also need to have backup generators. These are usually gas or diesel. The planned 720MW data centre in Northumberland will have 600 diesel generators in place and planning documents for the Gyle, Edinburgh data centre suggest they will have back-up diesel generation. 

The back-up generators are supposed to be used only for emergencies,however, in Virginia data centres are running diesel generators in more circumstances and the state is looking to change rules to allow them to run as a matter of course when the grid is under strain.

Scottish Policy and Data Centres:

Several Scottish Government policy documents make mention of green data centres, but with no definition of what it means.

On 11th March 2021 the Scottish Government published Scotland’s digital strategy with one of its nine key actions being “Establish Scotland as an attractive location for green data centres”. However data centers were mentioned nowhere else in that report. There was no explanation of why this was important for the strategy and there was no definition of what a green data centre is. On 17 March a separate short document called Green data centres and digital connectivity: action plan for Scotland was published with a little more detail. It also did not define the term ‘green data centre’.

Scotland’s National Planning Framework 4 (NPF4) is the overarching policy document for decision makers looking at planning applications. It has 18 National Developments, and one is Scotland’s Digital Fibre Network. Within this priority, green data centres are named, but it is not clear whether this means all data centres or just those ‘contributing to ‘Digital Fibre Network’. There are no criteria given, by which planning authorities can assess whether a proposal is a ‘green’ data centre. 

In answer to a Written Question, to clarify the position of data centres within NPF4, Scottish Government said that ‘all green data centres of a major scale are designated as part of National Development 12: the Digital Fibre Network. This can include AI-focused data centres, provided they meet the criteria for major development and are considered ‘green’.’

However, there is currently no definition standard for what qualifies as a green data centre. Instead, Scottish Government, in the answer to the Written Question, said it is ‘for the planning authority to interpret and apply NPF4 according to the circumstances of each individual case.’*

This has resulted in developers labelling all their proposed data centres ’green’ in the hope that they will be considered a Priority Development and therefore get an easier ride through the planning system. Green-washing claims abound, with data centre developers claiming that use of the Scottish grid means they are green (because it is 73% renewable energy), and that they are green because they have solar panels, low flush toilets or low energy lighting. 

We also believe that having green data centres as a priority in NPF4 means that there is a lot of land speculation as developers believe they can get planning permission for sites that would be completely unsuitable for any other industrial development, or development at all such as Green belts. 12 out of the 16 sites in the planning system are on Green Belt sites or farmland and only two in Brownfield sites. None of the sites in planning are on a priority list of potential sites drawn up by government bodies in 2021 and updated in 2023.

*Scottish Government’s AI Strategy published in March 2026 says that by 2027 they will ‘Publish guidance on what factors are prevalent in a ‘green’ data centre.’ Footnote 1′

Future Energy Demand

Data centres are noted as sources of increasing energy demand in the transitional RESP (Regional Energy Strategic Plan) with 1.6GW of increased demand associated with Data centres in Scotland. In answer to a Parliamentary question the Scottish Government noted that NESO had allocated between 1-2GW of additional demand due to data centres. The SSEP (Strategic Spatial Energy Plan) will be published for consultation in 2027.

Our Asks:

In a joint letter with ERCS to the Minister responsible for planning Ivan McKee,

We asked the Scottish Government to introduce a moratorium immediately to prohibit planning permission from being granted for any new data centre developments, while they do the following:

1. Publish an analysis of the impact of data centres on Scotland’s grid and net zero pathway:

including consideration of the cumulative impact of data centres coming forward on Scotland’s energy supplies, energy prices and climate targets, including the impacts of the gas or diesel back-up generation which is required on site.

2. Publish a planning circular or planning guidance

This needs to clearly define what constitutes a ‘green data centre’, including guidance on alignment with net zero, and which informs developers that they are to include information regarding the capacity and electricity consumption of any proposed data centres clearly in application and pre-application documents; 

3. Amend the Environmental Impact Assessment Regulations

to make environmental impact assessments mandatory for all planning applications for data centres. This could be done by adding data centres to Schedule 1 of those Regulations. EIAs must ensure that a thorough analysis is carried out of the impact of the energy and water use of data centres, before a decision is made on whether to grant planning permission.

Our letter, and the Scottish Government response is here:

We plan to campaign for policy change in the areas above while also helping communities fight each data centre where they live.

Climate mitigation requires demand management, not support for installations which impose such significant demand pressures on the grid at the same time as more renewable capacity is required to decarbonise heat, transport and industrial processes. Unless and until these issues are resolved, no hyperscale data centres should be built in Scotland. 

More Information

Data Centres need huge amounts of energy – they will need two 275kV lines, so they need to be close to the major substations. We are already seeing data centre applications clustering around these: eg Newarthill, Kilmarnock, Lambhill, Eccles

Map from Scottish Power 5-year plan 2026- 2031

Here is the equivilemt document for Scottish and Southern Energy Networks: Delivering a Network for Net Zero: The Pathway to 2030

see interactive map

Scottish Government Plans for Data Centres

See pages 36 and 37 of Scotland’s AI Strategy 2026-2031