Planning authorities in Scotland must now notify ministers within seven days of validating any datacentre application that exceeds 50MW of power capacity, under a direction that came into force on 17 August and applies retrospectively to schemes already in the pipeline.
The direction, made under Regulation 31 of the Town and Country Planning (Development Management Procedure) (Scotland) Regulations 2013, does not hand ministers a veto. What it creates is central visibility – a running log of every large datacentre bid moving through a planning system that has absorbed a wave of speculative artificial intelligence (AI) campus proposals this year.
The move arrives at the end of a summer in which Scotland’s datacentre pipeline went from a niche concern to a live political fight. In July, the SNP’s national council backed a motion calling for a temporary moratorium on new AI datacentre developments, while the Scottish Greens have pushed repeatedly for a pause until a national strategy and clear planning guidance exist.
Public finance minister Hannah Mary Goodlad – who signed the direction – frames the move as oversight rather than prohibition. “We must balance the economic and employment interests in developing datacentres with national energy, climate and community wealth building ambitions, which are vital to our future prosperity, as well as the potential impact on local communities,” she said. “It is essential to secure public benefits from this type of development, and I am clear that voices of communities that will be affected will be central to any considerations on datacentres.”
Alongside the direction, Goodlad has intervened in three individual schemes. That includes a 212MW proposal at Redheughs Avenue in west Edinburgh, on the former Royal Bank of Scotland headquarters site, which councillors rejected unanimously in February. That decision now rests with ministers. She has also required environmental impact assessments (EIAs) at Wester Hermiston in Edinburgh and at Auchtertool in Fife, having earlier ordered one for a 210MW scheme at South Gyle, which Edinburgh City Council rejected on environmental grounds.
The interventions land against a backdrop of capacity numbers that do not add up to the government’s own ambitions. Computer Weekly’s analysis puts current UK datacentre capacity at around 1.6GW across just under 190 sites. Add the projects that already have planning consent and the UK is on course for 4.9GW by 2030, well short of the 6GW of AI-capable capacity ministers have said the country needs – even though the total pipeline, including unapproved schemes, reaches 8.1GW.
Scotland is the extreme case. The Barbour ABI construction data (from March) used in that analysis recorded only four planned datacentres north of the border, two of which account for more than 99% of the capacity, with the largest – the 550MW former Ravenscraig steelworks site – still in public consultation as a potential AI growth zone, and the vast bulk of it without planning consent.
Campaigners’ figures run far higher because they count an earlier stage of the process. Where Barbour ABI tracks projects that have entered the planning system, countryside charity Action to Protect Rural Scotland (APRS) tallies proposals from the earliest stages of publicity, before any application is lodged.
On that basis, APRS has counted 17 hyperscale datacentre proposals with a combined energy demand of between 4.45GW and 4.95GW – more than Scotland’s entire winter peak electricity demand of just more than 4GW, and with three-quarters of it from a single developer, Apatura. The SNP’s own national council put the pipeline higher still, at 24 projects.
The gap between the two counts – four datacentres in the planning system versus 17 to 24 announced projects – is itself a measure of how much of Scotland’s mooted pipeline is speculative.
The clearest example sits on the Cowal peninsula in Argyll, where a proposed hyperscale campus of up to 2GW across from Rothesay Bay has been “stalled if not halted”, with the developer citing grid connection delays. APRS had long argued the scheme was unrealistic at that scale.
“Our biggest concern was the possibility of an AI hyperscale datacentre of up to 2GW being developed across from Rothesay Bay,” APRS said in a press release. “It appears that neither the hyperscale datacentre nor the much smaller data storage centre will be going ahead, but we will continue to be vigilant in case the plans change.”
Similar questions surround a £15bn ($20bn) “sovereign AI” datacentre proposed by British real estate investor Martin Bellamy outside Irvine in Ayrshire, and energy firm ILI Group’s proposed 600MW Cato AI Data Centre at Auchtertool in Fife, which has drawn more than 1,200 planning comments and petition signatures running into the thousands. Local opposition has centred on noise, water consumption and the strain such sites would place on rural communities and the grid.
Not every proposal is vapour, though. In Lanarkshire, DataVita has announced a £300m expansion of its Airdrie site and a second facility, with Dell Technologies basing its Scottish team at the nearby AI innovation park. The direction does not block investment of that kind. It applies only to developments above 50MW and gives ministers sight of them, not a veto over them.
APRS director Kat Jones welcomed the move as common sense finally prevailing, but noted that it took a 10-month campaign to secure information the government could have requested in December, when the charity first warned that pipeline energy demand would double Scotland’s peak power. She argued that the EIA requirement should now extend to every other proposed hyperscale datacentre.
What the direction does not do matters as much as what it does. It imposes no pause, despite the Greens’ repeated calls for a moratorium, and it does nothing to define what a “green datacentre” is – the privileged category under National Planning Framework 4 that developers have exploited because no binding criteria exist.
Nor does it touch the grid. Notifying ministers of an application does not move a project up the connection queue at SSEN or National Grid, and that queue, not planning consent, is the binding constraint on much of the Scottish pipeline. For developers with live applications, the practical change is that a decision which might once have stayed at council level can now be pulled up to ministers on a case the government considers significant – selective oversight rather than blanket restriction.
Ireland already shows what happens when datacentre development outruns the grid. Dublin imposed a moratorium on new builds after datacentres reached one-fifth of the country’s electricity demand, a warning Scotland’s planners are watching closely.
Crackdowns of this kind are an almost inevitable response to a land grab in which the combined floated capacity of Scottish proposals would more than double the nation’s total electricity consumption of 21,762GWh in 2023.
The direction does not by itself end that land grab, and it will not by itself deliver the capacity the UK’s AI ambitions demand. What it does is strip speculative proposals of the obscurity in which they thrive, forcing ministers to see the aggregate demand the planning system is being asked to absorb.
That is an essential precondition for the evidence-led approach the UK needs – a planning framework that decides what gets built, and where, on the basis of what the grid can supply, what communities can sustain and what the country actually requires, rather than on the strength of developers’ guesswork.
