Holyrood ‘inching towards moratorium’ amid concerns over massive proposed developments in Auchtertool and beyond
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.
“The public pressure is huge,” said David Torrance, a member of the Scottish parliament representing the village. “I’ve never seen this level of objection to a local plan, and I have been in politics for 25 years.”
Similar concerns are being echoed across Scotland, next to gargantuan planned developments in towns such as Airdrie and Larbert. 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.
“The Scottish government is inching towards a moratorium,” said Kat Jones, director of the Edinburgh-based charity Action to Protect Rural Scotland. “MSPs return to parliament next week, after a summer in their constituencies where they have been hearing the concerns of local people about proposed hyperscale datacentres. 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.
“They are coming up here because we are energy-rich, and we are water-rich, and England is in drought and the grid is struggling,” said Torrance.
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.
“How can you possibly ask people to accept that?” Torrance said. “You can see why the public is objecting.”
Scotland has already started to take steps that could mean the Auchtertool datacentre – and dozens of others – may never be built.
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.