Scottish government to consider SNP national council motion for moratorium on all new datacentres

The Scottish government is about to consider a sweeping moratorium on building new datacentres, putting a key plank of the UK’s AI strategy at risk.

Last Sunday the Scottish National party (SNP)’s national council passed a motion to freeze all new datacentres in Scotland. That motion has been sent to the Scottish government to consider.

Suspicions grow in Lanarkshire that local people have been misled on supposed benefits of the huge development

• Revealed: landmark Scottish AI project has no prospect of meeting renewables promise

• What are Britain’s AI growth zones and are the plans feasible or ‘complete bunk’?

The promise was that a Scottish community would be transformed by massive investment and empowered to chase “the jobs of the future”. Instead, local people in Lanarkshire fear they may have to sell their properties and lose green belt land because of the errors of a badly planned AI datacentre complex, even as those jobs and investments never arrive.

Late last year, representatives of Oakes Energy Services began to knock on doors in Newarthill, a village east of Glasgow. In letters reviewed by the Guardian, they invited residents to individual meetings. They told them about plans for a solar farm, say local people, and made offers: free solar panels, tree planting, or even cash for their properties.

Exclusive: Government and developers privately acknowledged Lanarkshire datacentre site had power provision ‘issue’

• ‘It’s smoke and mirrors’: hope turns to fear in Scottish village chosen for AI datacentre

• What are Britain’s AI growth zones and are the plans feasible or ‘complete bunk’?

A landmark AI development billed as delivering jobs and prosperity has misrepresented its plans to channel a nuclear reactor’s worth of power to a site in rural Scotland, a Guardian investigation has found.

When it was announced in January, the government promised that an £8.2bn AI datacentre complex in Lanarkshire – built by the US firm CoreWeave and the Scottish company DataVita – would be powered entirely from on-site renewables and built by 2030.

Lanarkshire datacentre run by renewables and creating thousands of jobs not achievable by 2030, Guardian investigation finds

• Revealed: landmark Scottish AI project has no prospect of meeting renewables promise

• ‘It’s smoke and mirrors’: hope turns to fear in Scottish village chosen for AI datacentre

The Guardian has examined government plans to build Britain’s AI infrastructure for the future, finding some of these to be, in the words of one source, at best unclear and at worst “complete bunk”.

The plans in question are for AI growth zones, which are supposed to be regions where the government supports companies to build massive AI datacentre complexes, of 500MW or greater. These could be bigger than any now operating in the UK.

Neil Mackenzie on the environmental impact of the Loch Kemp project

Your article (First major hydropower projects in Great Britain in 40 years given go-ahead, 26 June) describes the proposal to build three pumped storage schemes in the Scottish Highlands. But it does not mention the huge environmental cost.

One scheme, the Loch Kemp project, will draw water from Loch Ness and pump it into the upper reservoir created by enlarging Loch Kemp. A giant power station is to be built in protected ancient woodland on the shores of Loch Ness. This woodland is a special area of conservation, an internationally recognised site, and will be partly destroyed by the power station and access road.