SNP push to freeze Scottish datacentres tests UK AI plan
TL;DR:
- The SNP’s national council has passed a motion to freeze all new datacentres in Scotland, now referred to the Scottish government for consideration.
- Any moratorium could apply to projects not yet granted planning permission, potentially halting the Lanarkshire “AI growth zone”.
- Campaigners point to 24 planned hyperscale sites that together would draw more than 1.5 times Scotland’s peak power demand.
British officials have long pushed Scotland as the prime location for datacentres, banking on its abundant renewable energy. That pitch now faces a political obstacle at home. The motion, passed by the SNP’s national council last Sunday, reflects growing unease that the scale of planned development amounts to “extreme overdevelopment” that could overwhelm the country’s renewables capacity.
A genuine policy fault line
The resolution is not yet government policy, and its exact scope would be for ministers to decide. But it strikes directly at a plank of the UK’s AI strategy. Graham Simpson MSP argued the issue is proportion, not prohibition: “There needs to be a proper piece of work at the government level to decide how many the country needs and what is our capacity for them.” The intervention follows Guardian reporting that developers and the government misrepresented the feasibility of the Lanarkshire hub, and earlier findings that other growth zones were “phantom investments”.
Looking forward
The timing compounds the pressure. On the same day, Commons committee chair Chi Onwurah criticised the government’s AI investment approach as “very opportunistic”, lacking any plan for genuine sovereign capability. It also echoes the Lanarkshire datacentre’s inability to meet its green-power pledge and the wider question of whether Britain can actually power its growth zones. With Andy Burnham reportedly weighing a review of technology policy, devolved resistance in Scotland may force a reckoning over how, and where, the UK’s compute is built.