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.
The AI datacentre complex represented a large part of Britain’s ambitions to keep up in the global AI race by building the infrastructure that underpins artificial intelligence. A central plank of the project’s viability was its ability to power itself. But documents obtained through freedom of information (FoI) requests and analysis of public records suggest the datacentre has no prospect of meeting that goal.
Private Acknowledgment of Power Issues
The Guardian obtained internal correspondence showing that the government and the site’s developers, even as they publicly promised that the Lanarkshire site would have up to 1GW of “new energy infrastructure”, were privately acknowledging that the site had an “issue” with “power provision” and that this would not happen. In response to questions from the Guardian, the government said the Lanarkshire complex would connect to the grid. This means it will either join a years-long queue or be expedited ahead of hundreds of other projects also vying for a connection. A government spokesperson said the site’s needs would still be met “overwhelmingly” with renewables.
The findings raise critical doubts over the UK’s ability to confront the key question now facing the world’s massive AI buildout: how to provide the extraordinary energy required to make it plausible.
Doubts Over Viability
AI datacentres are, essentially, buildings full of very specialised silicon chips. The chips do the calculations that underpin artificial intelligence models. The world’s biggest tech companies are now ploughing hundreds of billions of dollars into the buildout of AI datacentres. Behind all this spending is the belief that AI will fundamentally transform the global economy, and that once it does, the AI datacentres will pay for themselves. The question of whether AI is a boom or bubble now largely rests on huge infrastructure projects such as Lanarkshire.
The new details are not the first signal of problems in the UK’s burgeoning datacentre industry. In March, the Guardian reported that a series of high-profile projects announced over the past years were “phantom investments”, with the government failing to examine claims of job creation or audit multibillion-pound sums. Power is a particularly fraught issue in the UK, where it is more expensive than anywhere else in Europe. There is an eight- to 10-year queue for new developments to connect to the grid, a delay that hangs over houses and hospitals as well as datacentres.
Political Promises vs. Reality
Britain is not the only place where political ambitions appear blind to the cost and difficulty of massive datacentre projects. Cecilia Rikap, an associate professor at University College London, said: “Governments around the world, including in the UK, are making political promises that ignore the realities of building infrastructure. Instead of governing for their communities, they choose the AI narrative.” An analyst for a UK engineering consultancy who has advised several AI growth zone projects said: “There doesn’t seem to be appropriate scrutiny, public or otherwise, on these nationally significant projects. The figures and designs behind many schemes are at best indicative, and at worst complete bunk.”
Renewable Energy Claims Unsubstantiated
DataVita, the Lanarkshire complex’s developer, says it will power the site in Airdrie with more than 1GW of renewable energy, including 400MW of solar power and 800MW of wind. This is more than one and a half times the wind energy produced by Whitelee, the UK’s largest onshore windfarm, which occupies an area half the size of Bristol. It is roughly the power needed to supply 800,000 Scottish homes. On its website, DataVita implies that all the energy sources are already in place, describing “energy parks” that are “directly connected” to its datacentres, delivering power that is equivalent to a small nuclear reactor.
But there is no evidence that DataVita currently has 1GW of private-wire renewable energy powering its datacentres, or that it will have this in the near future. At present, the company has two much smaller operational datacentres, one in Glasgow and one in Chapelhall, the site of the Lanarkshire datacentre hub. Between them, they draw roughly 25MW from the grid. DataVita did not respond to an inquiry as to whether it had any currently installed renewables.
Land and Planning Constraints
There is also little evidence DataVita will have this energy in the near future, because it does not have the necessary land. Analysis by the Guardian, based on figures from the Edinburgh-based charity Action to Protect Rural Scotland (APRS), and reviewed by an energy consultant who works on datacentres, suggests DataVita’s stated plans for its renewable energy would need between 40 and 100 sq km of land. Its planning applications currently on file cover roughly 2 sq km in Lanarkshire, according to analysis by APRS reviewed by the Guardian. On its site, DataVita claims to have “over 1,000 acres” of renewables, or 4 sq km.
The energy consultant who reviewed the figures said: “To go from ‘nothing public’ to ‘country’s largest operational onshore windfarm’ in four years is pretty ambitious.” Given that DataVita has no plans on file for such a development, he concluded that the 2030 deadline was unlikely to be met. HfD Group, DataVita’s parent company, recently posted plans for an “energy park” in Lanarkshire. These plans do not appear to have entered the planning process yet, but envision “up to 19” wind turbines being built in Lanarkshire. This would still only provide about 5% of what DataVita claims it will generate.
DataVita said the delivery of its energy commitments was “subject to final commercial agreements, planning, grid and consenting processes”. Kat Jones, the director of APRS, said: “There is a wave of applications for hyperscale AI datacentres coming to Scotland and they all say they’re going to use renewable energy. We have examined DataVita’s plans to build renewables to power their 500MW datacentre and found them wanting. Even if they could build the amount of energy infrastructure they say they will, it would cover 100 kilometres squared, but only provide for half their energy requirements on average.”
Government Awareness and Designation
This shortfall is not only DataVita’s problem. As a “growth zone”, Lanarkshire is a centrepiece of the UK’s AI ambitions – one of five sites designated to receive broad government support in building out vast datacentre parks. On paper at least, AI growth zones need to meet a strict set of requirements, the most important being that they should have a realistic path to powering themselves. These requirements were set out in an application last summer that invited sites across the UK to apply to be AI growth zones. The government asked applicants to show they had an already allotted grid connection or an alternative “behind-the-meter” solution – that is, a way to generate energy independently without a grid connection.
The Guardian established that the Lanarkshire site did not have the necessary grid connection, through an FoI inquiry to the UK’s National Energy System Operator (Neso). DataVita’s stated plans to generate its own electricity, meanwhile, do not appear to hold water. Documents obtained by the Guardian through an FoI suggest both the government and DataVita are aware of these issues but that the government chose to designate Lanarkshire as an AI growth zone anyway.
In February, Scotland’s first minister, John Swinney, addressed a letter to the managing director of DataVita, Danny Quinn, about Lanarkshire’s designation as an AI growth zone. He said: “I recognise that power provision remains a key issue and we will continue to engage with the UK government and relevant partners to secure timely grid connections that enable and support the development to proceed at pace.” In a meeting in March, DataVita and officials from Nature Scotland appeared to bank on an expedited grid connection for the project: “DV4 will be driven by Scottish Power connections timescales which we expect to be brought forward to 2027.”
Meanwhile, other internal communications show that shortly before the Lanarkshire project was announced, UK and Scottish officials appeared to entertain the idea that DataVita’s site would simply burn gas to power itself. (DataVita said gas or any other fossil-fuel generation would not be used to power its datacentres.) The consultant said DataVita’s own publications, and the fact they contain no indication of how it could realistically generate the energy it claims, called into question the seriousness of the government’s policymaking around a central component of its growth plans. “It indicates that the AI growth zone designation is based more on optimistic and flashy promotional material than anything technically viable,” he said. As for the government’s apparent willingness to later help DataVita get a grid connection, he said: “It now appears that the government is willing to loosen their own criteria to meet the arbitrary political timescales they set themselves.”
In response to a query from the Guardian, DataVita said the Lanarkshire development’s “energy strategy is based on new renewable generation, private-wire infrastructure, and intelligent connection to Scotland’s electricity system, with delivery subject to final commercial agreements, planning, grid and consenting processes”. A government spokesperson said: “The Lanarkshire AI growth zone is on track to be the biggest datacentre development in Scottish history. AI is critical to the UK’s future prosperity and security – and to unlock its benefits, we need the infrastructure that underpins it. The whole government is determined to create the right conditions for investment in the UK’s AI and datacentre infrastructure – with Lanarkshire set to be the first AI growth zone in the country to see hardware rolled out.”
