Big Tech and the Myths of the Green Data Centre

Exploring the disinformation and greenwash around hyperscale data centres, Coll McCail contrasts the social investment of previous green tech like the Highland hydro schemes with the plans to ‘launder our land for the profits of the world’s wealthiest men.’ 

Earlier this month, the SNP’s National Council passed a motion that would freeze the development of all new data centres in Scotland. The resolution came as The Guardian “Revealed: landmark Scottish AI project has no prospect of meeting renewables promise”  by 2030.

When it was first announced earlier this year, the government promised that an £8.2bn AI datacentre complex in Lanarkshire would be powered entirely from on-site renewables and built by 2030.

This is simply not true.

As Aisha Down writes:

“DataVita, the Lanarkshire complex’s developer, said 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 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.”

The North Lanarkshire site, a joint initiative between US firm CoreWeave and the company DataVita, is just one of at least 17 data centres moving through Scotland’s planning system.

While communities from Auchtertool to Duns have raised urgent concerns about the immediate impact of such projects on their electricity and water supply, the proliferation of proposals reveals something far more fundamental about the Scottish economy — and the attitudes of those responsible for it in Edinburgh and London. 

Arguing for data centres in the latest edition of Scotland on Sunday, Sandy Begbie, the chief executive of Scottish Financial Enterprise, suggested that the plans had been “hijacked by politics, minority vested interests and false information”. His position constitutes little but a weak attempt to distract from a broader international economic context. 

Earlier this year, Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire as SpaceX was publicly listed on the Nasdaq for the first time. The rocket company’s record-breaking $1.5 trillion IPO derived in part from a deal struck with Musk’s own artificial intelligence startup, xAI. The news served as further confirmation of the tech oligarchy’s grip on the global economy, reaffirming who really stands to gain from the ‘AI boom’. Try as Begbie might to insist otherwise, these are the true “vested interests” articulating a vision for Scotland as little more than a well-placed outpost for cloud capital. 

Unfortunately, this hasn’t stopped Edinburgh’s politicians from instinctively and uncritically jumping on the bandwagon. The Scottish Government’s National Planning Framework, for example, explicitly supports “green data centres” and Bute House has been clear in its aim to “secure commercial investment” in such projects to “help drive economic growth”. In theory, this position should be reversed by last week’s SNP National Council decision. However, externalising control of the economy ceased to be simply policy long ago and instead became the organising principle of government in Scotland. It will take more than a resolution to extricate it, not least because so-called “green data centres” — as the Scottish Government calls them — offer a welcome opportunity to paper over the ever-widening cracks in the energy transition.

One proposal in Fife, for example, has greenwashed itself by promising employment in recently deindustrialised areas like Mossmorran. In a striking illustration of the lack of control or ownership afforded to workers themselves, developers argue the location is “ideal due to the available employment” following the closure of ExxonMobil’s ethylene plant. The East Coast is not alone. Ravenscraig too is primed to become one of Britain’s biggest data centres with the former steelworks subject to a £3.9bn proposal from developer Apatura. 

Meanwhile, two of Scotland’s richest men have lodged a pitch in Greenock, the most deprived town in Scotland. Sandy and James Easedale hope to situate their data centre on the former site of American electrical manufacturer IBM. Demonstrating just how little has been learnt from the ‘Silicon Glen’ collapse, the area’s hopes are to be pinned once again on the fortunes of multinational technology companies.

Writing in The Times earlier this month, columnist Kenny Farquharson suggested Scotland should “embrace” the rise of data centres. The country possesses adequate water and energy resources to endure the added pressure of proposed developments, he posited. While conceding the importance of clear and adequate local and national regulation, Farquharson’s argument failed to deal with the question of ownership. This is a noteworthy omission given his invocation of Scotland’s post-war hydro power revolution: “The lost glens, the submerged homes, the irrevocably changed landscapes. The pain of such upheaval is almost unthinkable now. Yet it was the price of progress.” 

These costs, however, were not borne for private gain. Instead, they led to a historic rise in working-class living standards. The numerous state-owned hydroelectric power schemes approved between 1944 and 1947 helped to deliver power and social improvement across the Highlands. Less than one in 10 of the region’s residents lived without electricity by 1960, a drop of 35% in little over a decade. 

The North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board, which lasted until Margaret Thatcher’s privatisation of key utilities in 1990, ensured natural resources were used for the public good. Data centres are built to do the opposite, drawing on Scotland’s wind and rain to enrich Silicon Valley’s tech giants. This is among the reasons why the landowners who opposed Tom Johnstone’s bid to electrify the Highlands favour the rise of the data centre today: It’s a money-maker, not a social investment. 

It is this reality which makes the UK government’s decision to classify these developments as critical national infrastructure all the more suspect. A status otherwise reserved for sectors such as food, energy and emergency services, the move underlines the extent to which cloud capital has already begun to undermine Britain’s democratic processes. 

Many data centre applications in England, for example, will now be dealt with centrally by the UK Government rather than scrutinised by local authorities which have been shorn of the opportunity to hold developers accountable. The Labour Party’s proximity to the tech lobby is such that their proposals are unlikely to experience much pushback around the Cabinet table. Only last year, Lucas Amin and Peter Geoghegan revealed that then Science and Technology Secretary Peter Kyle had asked one senior Google employee to “sense check” his government’s AI policy before promising Amazon he would “advocate” for them before Britain’s competition watchdog. These were not one-off encounters. Government ministers and senior civil servants met with tech industry executives and lobbyists an average of six times a week during Labour’s first six months in office. 

Many of these companies have since initiated plans to construct their own data centres in Britain. Amazon Web Services intends to invest £8bn in such projects over the next five years while Microsoft and Google are separately building their first UK data centres at the moment. With AI now accounting for over a third of the US stock market, the domestic political class have abandoned even the pretence of paying heed to their constituents’ concerns. Amidst an era of generalised democratic retreat, the dominance of the tech sector and its leading luminaries is such that Jeff Bezos and Sam Altman wield far more power over the UK government than anyone who actually lives in Britain. 

Years before his election to Westminster, Tom Johnstone penned his powerful polemic ‘Our Scots Noble Families: A General Indictment’ in 1909. “So long as half the race is compelled by dire necessity to kneel cap-in-hand before the Lord who owns the soil, so long will our rural populations be cast in a spiritless mould,” argued the Red Clydesider. His words, then reserved for Scotland’s feudal nobility, could today be written of those who — in lieu of developing an industrial strategy fit for the needs of people and planet — propose to launder our land for the profits of the world’s wealthiest men. 

Photo by Taylor Vick on Unsplash

See also:

We’re All NIMBYs Now – Kat Jones

Community resistance is springing up across Scotland to AI data centres – Rachel Revesz

Eh? Aye? Resisting Scotland’s Hyperscale Data Centre Revolution – Mike Small

The AI Backlash Is Real. And It’s Winning – Ewan Morrison