TL;DR
Campaigners at 23 proposed Scottish AI data centre sites are combining into a push for national regulation, as Falkirk Council prepares to rule on a 300MW scheme by 17 September. Reporting from three affected communities finds employment promises shrinking to a few hundred permanent roles. One site’s own environmental assessment predicts nitrogen dioxide peaks breaching the healthy hourly limit 44 times.
Larbert: the decision closest to landing
Apatura’s 300MW proposal at the Glenbervie commercial estate is the only live application still with a council rather than ministers, after Hannah Mary Goodlad, the public finance minister, called in two others. Falkirk officers are working to an internal target of 17 September, and the window for public comments closed today.
Its neighbours are a care home, a dental practice, a hotel, a nursery and a primary school, with Forth Valley Royal Hospital a few hundred metres off. An investigation by The National found the site would enter Scotland’s ten largest polluters — ahead of Shell’s Mossmorran plant and the gas-fired station at Peterhead — because backup generators are scheduled for 8.5 hours of routine testing daily. The developer’s own assessment puts worst-case nitrogen dioxide at 8,800 micrograms per cubic metre.
The jobs arithmetic
At Ravenscraig, where the steelworks employed up to 13,000 people before closing in 1992, a 550MW scheme now sits inside a regeneration plan drawn up for a mixed-use new town. Campaigners object that it would occupy ground earmarked for 1,000 homes, on a former industrial site, without an environmental impact assessment covering contamination risk. The landowners — Scottish Enterprise, Tata Steel and Wilson Bowden — back it alongside Apatura, whose position is that brownfield comes first and that construction and supply-chain work should count in any employment tally.
In Chapelhall, home to Scotland’s first AI Growth Zone since January, DataVita and ILI Group want roughly 100 acres between them. Local campaigners Diane and Ann were explicit that they are not against technology; their objection is to opaque process, siting and employment figures that have not survived scrutiny. Recent analysis found the thousands of jobs trailed at the Growth Zone launch were largely temporary construction contracts, with permanent headcount at best in the low hundreds and weighted towards security, cleaning and admin.
Looking forward
Scale is the thing to hold onto. Scotland’s largest operating facility draws 24MW. What is now in the system runs to 600MW at Auchtertool and 550MW at Hunterston, against a world-largest AI site in Nevada at 650MW.
A second national demonstration is planned at Holyrood on 3 September. The question underneath every local objection is who the compute is actually for: developers typically build and sell on, and one Larbert-linked operator is reported to be American. Andy Burnham was said to be weighing limits on foreign ownership of UK data centres before taking office, with nothing published since. Until something is, communities are being asked to carry the grid load, the emissions and the noise for an end user nobody will name.