Scotland could freeze datacentre projects in challenge to UK’s AI strategy | Scotland

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.

It could apply to all datacentre projects that have not yet received planning permission – although its exact implementation is up to the Scottish government to decide.

Lesley Backhouse, a local councillor from one of the constituencies that put forward the motion, said that Scotland’s current datacentre plans amounted to “overdevelopment” and were “intrusive and not keeping with the local environment”.

The move emerged as the Guardian on Monday revealed how the developer and the UK government misrepresented the technical feasibility of a massive datacentre hub in Scotland in the face of community fears that their land would be subsumed by the development, and promised jobs and investments would never materialise.

This site, in Lanarkshire, was to be an “AI growth zone”, a key element of the government’s strategy to build national AI infrastructure in rural areas of Britain.

The SNP’s resolution came amid signs of a wider upheaval in the UK’s AI strategy as Andy Burnham prepares to replace Keir Starmer in Downing Street. He is reportedly considering a review of several critical planks of Starmer’s technology policy.

The Guardian previously reported that an “AI growth zone” in North Tyneside was more of a publicity stunt than a viable project, despite being supposedly backed by the maker of ChatGPT, OpenAI. Several other big UK AI projects have been found to be “phantom investments” after the government failed to audit investment numbers or jobs claims.

“I don’t think anyone is arguing that we should not have any datacentres in the UK or Scotland,” said Graham Simpson, a member of the Scottish parliament representing North Lanarkshire.

“But there needs to be a proper piece of work at the government level to decide how many the country needs and what is our capacity for them, in terms of our resources.”

A moratorium on datacentres in Scotland could strike at the heart of the UK’s wider AI strategy. British officials have pushed Scotland as the prime location for datacentres due to its access to plentiful renewable energy. The SNP’s resolution could halt projects such as the Lanarkshire AI growth zone.

The SNP resolution suggests that the number of massive datacentres planned in Scotland could overwhelm its renewables capacity.

It says there are 24 “hyperscale” datacentre projects in various stages of planning in Scotland. Combined, they would use more than one-and-a-half times the power Scotland uses at peak demand.

“It is extreme overdevelopment. I’m very supportive of the local community and their endeavours to prevent this from happening,” said Backhouse.

Meanwhile, the chair of the Commons science and technology select committee, Chi Onwurah, on Monday criticised the UK’s broader AI investment strategy, saying that without a proper plan for achieving sovereignty it has been “very opportunistic”.

She characterised the process as “X or Y or Z says they’re going to invest [and so] we’ll take that as part of an investment plan and then the investments aren’t realised”.

She also said that the Starmer government’s plan for AI growth zones had been affected by “a lack of clarity that they were about ensuring that the benefits of AI were felt in the place”.

“They weren’t matched, as I suppose Andy Burnham might put it, by a comprehensive place-based strategy to make sure that happened,” she said.

Meanwhile Onwurah’s committee called on the next government to set out how it intends to protect its sovereignty in AI and said: “It is essential to ensure that the UK cannot be cut off from key technologies at the whim of a foreign government.”

The warning comes after the White House last month blocked foreign access to the most powerful tools made by the leading US AI company Anthropic. The cross-party committee said the White House’s temporary export ban “should be a powerful reminder that the UK may not be able to count on even its allies for access to vital technology.”

“I hope the incoming administration will learn from the mistakes of its predecessors and move quickly to create a clear plan for how it will work internationally on science and technology,” Onwurah said.

The call for greater sovereignty came as the government released more details of the nine companies it has supported so far under the £500m Sovereign AI Fund launched to back homegrown AI founders in April. Four of the nine companies so far awarded cash investment or offers to use the government’s supercomputers in Bristol and Cambridge are ultimately controlled by American firms, according to a freedom of information response.