Milly Hean
From your favourite Netflix series and social media channel to AI and online banking, much of our lives now depend on a vast and growing network of invisible but physical infrastructure. At the heart of it all sit data centres – the warehouses of hardware that make the cloud-based world go round.
It’s a buzz term that seems to be everywhere, with the latest highlight being Elon Musk’s bid to send the first data centre into space.
Closer to home, last week the City of Edinburgh Council delivered aunanimous rejection of plans for a hyperscale AI data centre at South Gyle. This came despite recommended approval of the facility from city planning officers.
This unanimity across the political spectrum was both unusual and telling of a growing tension in this emerging policy frontier.
Councillors’ objections mainly stemmed from the project’s description as “green”, despite the absence of a concrete definition of the term and reports from the developer that it would use 213 megawatts of power at peak operation, comparable to the combined energy consumption of all households in Glasgow and Edinburgh. An eleventh-hour intervention by environmental campaigners in the form of an open letter ultimately tipped the scales.
That decision, however, is somewhat of an anomaly against an otherwise accelerating national picture. Scotland positioned itself as a data centre destination as far back as 2021 and Scotland’s current national spatial strategy, “NPF4” or National Planning Framework 4, explicitly supports “green data centres” that utilise Scottish renewable energy.
The UK government has gone further still. Lanarkshire has been classified as an AI Growth Zone – a designation designed to streamline planning and attract investment, with the government projecting £8 billion in private sector investment. Data centres have also been brought within the Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIP) programme in England and Wales, meaning planning applications for major facilities can now bypass local authorities entirely and be determined by the secretary of state for science, innovation and technology, Liz Kendall.
The direction of travel from both governments is clear: build big and fast. But the local authority decision-makers and communities are not always on board.
Resistance to large infrastructure projects is nothing new, from pylons to nuclear power plants. But data centres present the distinct challenge of a fundamental dislocation between the user and the product.
There is a growing realisation that a data centre in your neighbourhood offers a thin social dividend relative to its acreage and carbon footprint, with some hiring as few as a dozen permanent operational staff. For local planning authorities and residents, concerns also extend to emissions, noise and water use, as well as whether already-strained electricity grids can realistically absorb facilities of this scale.
However, as easy as it is to demonise data centres, there is no escaping that we are going to need them. Lots more of them. Cloud computing demand is not slowing. Crucial AI applications that require real-time processing – remote healthcare diagnostics, autonomous vehicles, smart infrastructure – depend on computing power close to end users. For the UK to increase its sovereignty and competitiveness, and for organisations across the public and private sectors to access these capabilities, domestic data centre capacity is a must-have.
The current consultation on England’s National Policy Statement presents a rare chance to bring clarity and coherence to this space, and Scotland should be carving out a similarly deliberate moment of reflection.
Policymakers must grapple with the unresolved tensions between ambitions for digital growth, net-zero commitments, and the legitimate concerns of communities asked to host energy-intensive facilities they might not fully understand.
The public, too, must reckon with the fact that their digital lives require serious hardware. After all, the cloud, for all its abstraction, is not weightless.
At the same time, applicants must also play their part to demystify the process. Developers and industry leaders have a responsibility to communicate their projects to decision makers and the public with genuine transparency, reporting on energy sources, water use and economic impact rather than vague claims of being “green”.
If Scotland is serious about capturing the economic promise of AI and cloud computing, it will need joined-up policy across governments that bridges the current impasse between strategic national goals and local planning realities.
Better decision-making is not about waving developments through willy nilly, but should be grounded in transparent evidence, meaningful deliberation and public trust.
The question, then, is not whether we need more data centres (we do) but whether we can lift our heads out of the clouds long enough to deliver them sustainably and equitably.