Fife village opposes 600MW AI datacentre ‘larger than the village itself’

TL;DR:

• ILI has lodged a planning application with Fife Council for a 600MW hyperscale AI datacentre at Auchtertool — only the second Scottish AI datacentre to reach this stage, following the rejected 213MW South Gyle proposal in Edinburgh.
• Auchtertool Community Council says the development would be larger than the village itself, and is “vigorously” opposing on grounds of energy demand, water use, noise, heat loss and impact on a wildlife reserve and 16th-century castle ruins.
• For UK AI policy: Scotland’s combined datacentre pipeline now projects 6.2GW of energy demand against a peak grid load of just over 4GW — a structural collision the Scottish Government has yet to address.

ILI has filed a planning application with Fife Council for a 600MW AI datacentre near the village of Auchtertool, becoming only the second Scottish AI datacentre proposal to reach this stage of planning. The first — a 213MW site in Edinburgh’s South Gyle — was rejected. The public has three to four weeks to comment before a decision is made.

A village smaller than the development that would surround it

Auchtertool Community Council chair Andrea Cail said the application’s six 35-metre buildings would take up more land than the village itself. The application has been described as “extremely vague” on the actual energy and water requirements, and on the noise and heat loss the surrounding area would experience.

Two specific concerns stand out. The proposed site overlaps with the Auchtertool Linn Wildlife Site, and the data centre buildings are planned to be built over the ruins of the 16th-century Hallyards/Camilla Castle. The application also identifies no end user — meaning the eventual configuration could change once a customer is secured. “This is an application with no end user identified and the statement of intent shows the proposal could be changed and modified once an end user is found, which is really concerning,” Cail said.

The Scottish grid problem

The Auchtertool application is part of a wider pipeline of around 25 Scottish data centre projects with a combined projected energy demand of more than 6.2GW. Scotland’s peak energy demand has been registered at just over 4GW, according to the National Energy System Operator. Not all projects will be approved or completed, but the gap is structural rather than rounding error.

Dr Kat Jones, director of Action to Protect Rural Scotland, told The National that “If these data centres get built it certainly won’t be Scotland’s Energy, it will be Silicon Valley’s energy”. She pointed to research showing data centres typically employ 20 to 50 people each while drawing vast amounts of energy, and warned of household energy price rises in areas where hyperscale datacentres are built. The Edinburgh South Gyle proposal had been calculated to emit over 200,000 tonnes of carbon a year — equivalent, the developer Shelborne Drummond said, to a second Edinburgh Airport.

UK policy context

The Auchtertool application lands the same week that Microsoft pitched its £23 billion UK AI infrastructure investment (covered separately) as the foundation of a British “intelligence economy”. The two stories speak to the same unresolved tension: the AI economy requires substantial physical infrastructure, but the political and grid realities of building that infrastructure are non-trivial. Scotland, England and Wales all face variants of the same problem — but the energy-demand gap is sharpest north of the border.

Looking forward

A Holyrood debate on the future of Scotland’s energy is scheduled, with Jones and others urging the Scottish Government to legislate tighter regulation of hyperscale AI datacentres. The combination of community opposition, grid constraints and the looming Auchtertool decision means Scotland will be one of the more interesting jurisdictions to watch on AI infrastructure planning over the next twelve months.