Exclusive:SNP ministers urged to take AI data centre planning decisions away from local government

Sandy Begbie , chief executive of Scottish Financial Enterprise, said decisions around whether AI data centres should be built are “of national importance for economic growth, resilience and security” and should be distanced from “petty point scoring politics”.

AI data centres have been pioneered by big tech giants like Google and Microsoft as a way of handling the vast computational demands of artificial intelligence and cloud computing.

But many others see them as an environmental scourge and an immense drain on natural resources.

The Scottish and UK Governments are generally in favour of the centres because of their boost to economic growth.

But some local authorities are under pressure to block any developments. Edinburgh City Council’s planning committee recently called for a nationwide moratorium on new data centres. Meanwhile, thousands of residents have objected to planned hyperscale centres in Fife and Falkirk.

Mr Begbie, in an article for Scotland on Sunday, said: “These are decisions of national importance for economic growth, resilience and security, and we should treat them so by designating data centres as critical national infrastructure.

“As such, we should remove decisions around planning of these projects away from local authorities and the petty point scoring politics, and bring these decisions of national importance into central government.

“As a country, some would have us stick our heads in the sand and carry on as we always have, using yesterday’s solutions to solve tomorrow’s problems.

“Instead, our political leaders should learn the lessons of history and show leadership to face down the naysayers.”

Mr Begbie said that while ethical, environmental and societal considerations surrounding developments had to be “managed sensitively”, the debate over data centres had so far been “relatively fact free” and “hijacked by politics, minority vested interests and false information”.

There are 23 data centres currently up and running in Scotland.

The largest of them is DataVita’s Fortis centre in the North Ayrshire village of Chapelhall with plans to expand its capacity to 40MW - the equivalent power of that used by around 30,000 homes.

The hyperscale centres which are in the pipeline are much bigger, with some potentially hitting 1,000MW.

Over a dozen sites in Scotland are earmarked for the creation of these new centres, which require a huge amount of water to keep the technology cool. A 100MW hyperscale centre is capable of consuming around 2.5 billion litres of water annually, the equivalent to the needs of approximately 80,000 people.

Kat Jones, director of charity Action to Protect Rural Scotland, which is campaigning for a moratorium on hyperscale data centres, said: “The kind of data centres that are valuable to our economy are those we have already: those that run cloud computing, banks, university research.

“Hyperscale AI data centres, which use 20-100 times more energy, are solely for training and running the large language models which benefit US big tech companies at the expense of our jobs and economy.”

A Scottish Government spokesperson said: “Ministers are giving active consideration as to whether the Scottish Government should provide planning guidance to balance the rapid expansion of hyperscale data centres with national energy and climate goals, which are vital to our future prosperity.

“It would not be appropriate for the Scottish Government to comment on any specific development proposals in the planning system, however we have been clear that the voices of communities that will be affected by these kinds of development must be central to any considerations.”

COSLA was contacted for comment.