Hundreds at Holyrood demand a pause on Scottish data centres

Hundreds of people gathered at the foot of Arthur's Seat beside Holyrood to demand that the Scottish government pause data centre construction until it produces an environmental impact assessment for the sector and defines what a "green" data centre actually is. Journalists covering it called the rally the largest of the campaign so far. It came after John Swinney's government set out a strategic approach to data centres in its programme for government — requirements covering environmental sustainability, resource use and benefit to local communities — while the First Minister declined to impose a moratorium. At least 20 facilities are already planned, and the number of potential projects may be higher.

Kat Jones, the 52-year-old director of the NGO Action to Protect Rural Scotland, spoke to the crowd, calling back and forth with them, asking who had travelled from Lammermuir, from Ayrshire, from Aberdeen. Jones, who is being compared to the American activist Erin Brockovich, has become one of the principal organisers of the campaign for a pause.

The irritation runs from Dunbar to Greenock, and it is about pace and scale as much as siting. Some developers want to put facilities in the countryside next to small villages; others are proposing them beside houses, residential streets and care facilities.

Kathleen White is opposing a £2 billion data centre planned for the Lammermuir Hills in the Scottish Borders. Her argument is that the site is wrong for it: there is a village of roughly 100 residents nearby, a reservoir and a fishing spot, and the area is known for its naturally dark skies. The complex would take eight hectares, mostly concrete, on undeveloped green land. For that landscape, she says, it would simply be too big a structure.

The fight matters well beyond the Borders because Scotland is where the UK's AI strategy went after the south of England pushed back. Keir Starmer's government has bet on AI as a way to lift weak economic growth, with "AI growth zones" — designated areas for large data centres, promising jobs and economic activity — as a central plank. Guardian investigations have questioned the arithmetic and the rationale behind that strategy. The grid is already strained, and data centre projects have met resistance in London and elsewhere in the south. British officials began steering prospective developers north on the grounds that Scotland has renewable generation and large water reserves, and was therefore the better place to host the country's entry in the AI race. One of the five UK growth zones is meant to land in Lanarkshire, countryside outside Glasgow. Protests and a possible moratorium put that redirection at risk.

Jones rejects the charge that the campaign is an obstacle to development. Local campaigners, she says, get labelled as people who object to anything near their own homes — but data centres carry national and international consequences. They are among the largest buildings on the planet, they consume enormous amounts of energy, and for residents they are a direct threat to the environment around their houses, hospitals and schools.

The politics have produced an unusual pairing. Both the Scottish Greens and Reform UK have come out against large data centres: Reform UK over the sheer number of projects, the Greens backing both a moratorium and nationwide rules. Ross Greer, the Scottish Greens co-leader, joined the protesters at Holyrood. His position is not that data centres are unnecessary — they are what makes the internet work, and Scotland has enough of them. It is that the new ultra-large facilities, each rated between 120 and 200 MW, would together draw more power than all of Scotland uses at peak demand. That, he says, is not a possible situation.

The government's answer is a reporting duty. Planning authorities must now notify ministers within a week of any new application for a data centre above 50 MW, which is meant to help track the effect on infrastructure; at the same time ministers stressed how much these facilities matter to economic growth. Hannah Mary Goodlad, Scotland's public finance minister, said construction has to account for economic and employment benefits, national energy and climate targets, community wellbeing and the possible consequences for residents, and that the views of affected communities should be central to how projects are assessed.

Notification is not refusal. A one-week notice requirement on applications above 50 MW tells ministers what is coming; it gives them no new power to stop anything, and the projects actually in dispute are two to four times that threshold. Asked about scale, the government has answered with process. And the word carrying the whole weight of that process — "green" — is precisely the one the campaigners say has never been defined, which is why they keep asking for the definition rather than for a ban. Until it means something specific, every developer will claim it, and every assessment will be an argument about vocabulary.

The quieter gap is on the numbers. Greer has put a figure against Scotland's peak demand; the government has put growth and jobs against it. Neither side in this account offers a number for new generation, grid connections or water draw, which is the only arithmetic that would settle whether 120 to 200 MW facilities are absorbable at all. Nor does the reporting name the company behind the £2 billion Lammermuir project. The opposition is organised and local; the counterparty is abstract.

Scotland was the fallback when the south said no. It is now producing the more serious obstruction of the two, assembled out of a coalition — rural conservationists, the Greens and Reform UK — that has nothing else in common and does not need to. Whatever emerges from that, the Lanarkshire growth zone is downstream of it.