United Kingdom · Wall Street · The Guardian Technology
The SNP resolution suggests that the number of large datacentres readied in Scotland could overwhelm its renewables capacity
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It says there are 24 “hyperscale” datacentre projects in various stages of planning in Scotland.
Key facts
- The SNP’s resolution came amid signs of a wider upheaval in the UK’s AI strategy as Andy Burnham prepares to replace Keir Starmer in Downing Street
- Last Sunday the Scottish National party (SNP)’s national council passed a motion to freeze all new datacentres in Scotland
- The Scottish government is about to consider a sweeping moratorium on building new datacentres, putting a key plank of the UK’s AI strategy at risk
- The warning comes after the White House last month blocked foreign access to the most powerful tools made by the leading US AI company Anthropic
Summary
The Scottish government is about to consider a sweeping moratorium on building new datacentres, putting a key plank of the UK’s AI strategy at risk. Last Sunday the Scottish National party (SNP)’s national council passed a motion to freeze all new datacentres in Scotland. It could apply to all datacentre projects that have not yet received planning permission, although its exact implementation is up to the Scottish government to decide. Lesley Backhouse, who attended the national council meeting, said that Scotland’s current datacentre plans amounted to “overdevelopment” and were “intrusive and not keeping with the local environment”. The move emerged as the Guardian on Monday revealed how the developer and the UK government misrepresented the technical feasibility of a massive datacentre hub in Scotland in the face of community fears that their land would be subsumed by the development, and promised jobs and investments would never materialise.