A Wall Street banker linked to Peter Mandelson and the son-in-law of a Russian-Israeli billionaire are among the influential figures backing the rush to build AI data centres across Scotland, the Sunday Mail has learned.
Interim Celtic chairman and former Labour MP Brian Wilson is also connected to a firm proposing a "hyper-scaler" site in Fife. The rapid expansion of data centres has sparked fears of environmental destruction, massive energy and water use leading to shortages and higher utility bills, and the AI they support could threaten thousands of jobs.
Protest at Hunterston estate
Last week, local activists disrupted a Highland clan gathering to protest against a proposed 500MW data centre at Hunterston in Ayrshire, metres from historic Hunter Castle. The company behind the plans, Eneus Energy Limited, is financed by £360bn US private equity firm Carlyle, led by former Goldman Sachs president Harvey Schwartz.
Schwartz, a Wall Street veteran and a major donor to Joe Biden's 2020 election campaign, was non-executive chairman of the Bank of London from 2021 to 2024, with Mandelson as his deputy. The start-up had touted a $1.1bn valuation and boasted of being only the second new clearing bank in the UK in more than 250 years. However, the bank later unravelled amid heavy financial losses, and Schwartz left in a boardroom exodus in 2024 along with Mandelson. The firm was fined £2m in March by the Bank of England's Prudential Regulation Authority for failing to act with integrity, including repeatedly misleading the regulator about its capital position with fabricated documents.
Mandelson later became the UK's ambassador to the US under Keir Starmer despite failing security vetting, and was sacked last year over his ties to paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Eneus Energy also receives financing from GIC, which helps manage Singapore's sovereign wealth fund and handles nearly £1trillion in assets.
'Complete lack of transparency'
Dr Kat Jones, director of Action to Protect Rural Scotland, said: "There is a complete lack of transparency in the whole unseemly rush to get planning permission for hyperscale data centres in Scotland.
"This lack of transparency and accountability to local people is in the proposals, with the one at Hunterston not even disclosing how much power it will draw. But it is also in who is behind them. We're not being told who these data centres are being built for and why they are needed. It seems that there are wealthy influential backers joining this speculative rush."
The proposed Hunterston site lies on the Hunterston Estate, north of West Kilbride and next to Hunterston Power Station. It is home to the 900-year-old Hunter Castle, the historic stronghold of Clan Hunter, where protesters gathered during a clan gathering last weekend.
At least 24 sites proposed
At least a dozen grassroots groups opposed to hyperscale data centres have formed in recent months. At least 24 sites are proposed across Scotland, with 17 already in the planning system. Campaigners warn that a single large hyperscaler can consume as much power as two cities, and if all the proposed schemes went ahead they would dwarf Scotland's total current energy demand. The Scottish Government is considering a freeze on massive data centres.
The revelations follow the collapse of plans for a 1GW £15bn site in Irvine led by real estate investor Martin Bellamy, whose firm AI Pathfinder crumbled and had its assets frozen after being embroiled in acrimonious lawsuits. Bellamy is married to Darina Kogan, daughter of Russian-Israeli billionaire Valery Kogan, who fell out with Vladimir Putin after the Russian courts nationalised Moscow's Domodedovo Airport, which Kogan co-owned.
Celtic links to Fife project
Bellamy and his wife live in a £9m mansion in the Cotswolds near Oasis star Liam Gallagher, and are locked in a row with local residents over a bid to build holiday lets on their 38-acre estate.
Meanwhile, ILI Group, which is proposing a £5bn 600MW data centre on the outskirts of the Fife village of Auchtertool, is being helped by two ex-politicians with ties to Celtic football club. Former UK energy minister and current Celtic chairman Brian Wilson is an adviser to ILI's board, while its chairman is former Glasgow Lord Provost Dr Michael Kelly, who sat on Celtic's board until 1994.
Both the Auchtertool project and a data centre proposal in Larbert, Falkirk, led by developer Apatura, have met with huge local opposition. Apatura is backed by Klint Ventures, a venture capital firm headquartered in Liechtenstein. The York-based firm has nine data centres in development in Scotland.
Last year, Apatura chief executive Miles Hanglin said he had been approached by "certain leading global hyperscalers" - major AI names such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google - looking for "large stakes in the north of the country where plentiful power is available". In December, the firm hired former Google executive Michael Hunter to lead its data centre portfolio.
CoreWeave's Lanarkshire campus
In April, the Sunday Mail reported that American AI giant CoreWeave pledged £1.5bn towards a massive £8.2bn data centre campus in Lanarkshire, which would get energy bill discounts from the UK Government as a designated "AI Growth Zone". The funding was announced during Donald Trump's state visit to the UK last year, when he brought a raft of tech billionaires in his entourage.
CoreWeave, formerly a cryptocurrency mining firm, pivoted to cloud computing and became a major player in AI, striking deals with tech titans like Nvidia and Microsoft. Its CEO Michael Intrator is worth an estimated £4bn.
