TL;DR
At least 31 logged encounters between the AI infrastructure industry and Scottish parliamentarians have taken place over roughly 20 months, on The National’s reading of Holyrood’s register. Developers, US cloud giants and trade associations account for them, and their targets extend past backbenchers to ministers and John Swinney himself. It marks a sharp rise on earlier years.
The developer with the most at stake
No firm has more Scottish sites in play than Apatura, which logged seven approaches during 2025. Several went to members representing the very constituencies where it wants to build: Clare Adamson of the SNP was approached over Ravenscraig, pitched as a growth zone for AI; Larbert, sited on Scottish Enterprise land, was raised with then-Falkirk West member Michael Matheson; Wester Hermiston went to Gordon Macdonald, then representing an Edinburgh seat. Internal documents obtained by The Ferret separately showed the company pressing ministers to adopt its own wording for what counts as a “green” facility.
Cloud giants and the trade bodies
CoreWeave, an American firm partnered with DataVita on a growth zone worth billions in North Lanarkshire, took its case to St Andrews House last November, meeting the First Minister and Richard Lochhead, business minister at the time. Lochhead proved a recurring destination: ScotlandIS reached him four times across the period, TechUK four times, and DataVita joined ScotlandIS for a session on what expanding operators need from government.
Where those meetings landed is consistent. ScotlandIS used a November session with Swinney to raise “barriers to investment, including planning permissions and processes, and how these could be made faster and easier”. TechUK argued the sector needed to “articulate the benefits”.
Then there is the item that is not a meeting. Google ran a tailored course on AI for sixteen Labour members at Holyrood, close to the whole group, its former leader and deputy leader included, and used it to make the case for regulation framed around innovation.
What ministers have conceded
A moratorium on further hyperscale building has been refused. What campaigners did extract is narrower: environmental impact assessments now attached to two schemes, one at Auchtertool in Fife, the other at Wester Hermiston.
Set beside last week’s story of Scottish objectors organising for national rules, the shape becomes clear. Both sides are working the same decision. One does it through planning objections, the other through the register — and only one of them gets to run a training session for a party group.
Looking forward
Scotland is where UK firms can watch whether planning friction or sustained industry access sets the pace of AI capacity. Those two assessments are the first genuine test, and how fast they conclude will tell operators more than any ministerial statement has managed so far.