TL;DR
Apatura, the developer behind ten of Scotland’s 24 hyperscale proposals, says its five planned sites would employ almost 2,100 people on site once running and pay £9.6m a year in community benefit. The figures arrive as campaigners use freedom of information requests to challenge how government job estimates for data centres are built.
The site-by-site numbers
Apatura’s breakdown, published by The Herald, gives staffing and annual community benefit for each campus:
- Ravenscraig, North Lanarkshire: 550MW, 567 on-site staff, £3.3m
- Westerhill, East Dunbartonshire: 300MW, 501 staff, £1.8m
- Freeport West Lothian: 250MW, 399 staff, £1.5m
- Wester Hermiston, Edinburgh: 200MW, 332 staff, £1.2m
- Larbert, Falkirk: 300MW, 297 staff, £1.8m
Ravenscraig, the former steelworks site, carries the largest claims. A study by consultancy Glic puts capital investment there at £3.7bn and says construction would sustain an average of 2,774 North Lanarkshire jobs over four years. Across all five sites, Apatura claims £2.2bn a year of net gross value added, which it says would lift Scottish GDP by roughly 1.2%.
Numbers under pressure
The timing matters. Holyrood has just voted for a 12-month pause on consenting while national guidance is written, and councils must now tell ministers within a week about any application above 50MW. Apatura alone accounts for ten of the 24 hyperscale schemes in the Scottish planning system.
Campaign group Action to Protect Rural Scotland has taken aim at a different figure. Its FOI request about the UK Government’s 3,400-job estimate for a separate Airdrie site found that under a tenth of it related to work inside the data centre itself. A UK Government spokesperson responded that judging such facilities purely on permanent headcount “ignores the opportunities they unlock”. The Herald notes Apatura’s own on-site figures were calculated separately.
Chief executive Giles Ganglin acknowledged “legitimate questions” about water, power and backup generation, saying cooling would run on a closed loop and a full environmental impact assessment would accompany the Ravenscraig application.
Looking forward
The distinction between on-site roles and jobs “supported” elsewhere is now the central argument in Scotland’s data centre debate, and Apatura has at least put a checkable on-site number against each campus. The national planning guidance due during the pause will decide how much weight councils give to supply-chain and GVA claims, which are far harder to verify than a headcount. For Scottish suppliers and landowners, the next year is a waiting period rather than a green light.