TL;DR
Holyrood’s Economy Committee has heard that talk of pausing datacentre development is already damaging Scotland’s standing with investors, alongside a claim that AI could lift Scottish GDP by upwards of £23 billion annually within a decade. It is the first formal parliamentary session in a sequence that has so far played out through protest and planning applications, and the industry witnesses used it to reframe the question from whether to build to how.
The case put to the committee
Sandy Begbie, who runs Scottish Financial Enterprise, told MSPs that the present tone of the argument is “proving to be quite negative with investors” and that the word moratorium in particular signals the wrong thing about Scotland’s appetite. He pointed to Morgan Stanley research estimating some £2.2 trillion ($3 trillion) of worldwide AI infrastructure spending by 2028, and asked how Scotland might capture a proportionate share of it.
Pressed by Labour MSP Daniel Johnson on what happens if the country builds none, Begbie said letting the opportunity pass was not a serious option and put the cost at potentially billions in forgone investment. His prescription was a more proportionate response modelled on Scandinavia and Ireland, in place of a debate he characterised as polarised.
A different problem from the same table
The session’s more uncomfortable evidence came from Rich Wilson of Gigged.ai, a Glasgow firm working with FTSE 100 and Fortune 500 clients. His argument was that Scotland’s constraint is not supply. Universities are producing strong computing and AI graduates in quantity; what is missing is somewhere for them to go. He described visiting a call centre in Livingston where over half the staff held AI or computer science degrees and had been unable to find work in the field.
That is a pointed contribution to a debate normally conducted in megawatts. Datacentres are among the least labour-intensive uses of power available — a point Verdant put at 8.6 permanent posts per megawatt this morning — so they answer the investment question Begbie raised without necessarily answering Wilson’s.
Looking forward
The committee is hearing this while 24 hyperscale proposals sit with Scottish planners and campaigners gather outside. For UK businesses watching the precedent, the useful detail is that neither witness defended the status quo: one wants faster consent, the other wants applied AI jobs. Nobody at the table argued the current arrangement is delivering both.