Kat Jones may be the closest thing Scotland has to Erin Brockovich in ۲۰۲۶. Standing in the shadow of Arthur’s Seat outside Holyrood, the ۵۲-year-old is revving up the crowd of protesters around her. “Who is here from Lammermuir? Ayrshire? What about Aberdeen?” she calls to the crowd.
On Thursday, hundreds travelled to Edinburgh to call for an immediate moratorium on Scotland’s datacentre boom, which includes one project in Auchtertool, Fife, that has been billed as the second largest in the world.
Jones, the director of the NGO Action to Protect Rural Scotland, is spearheading a campaign demanding a pause while the Scottish government produces analysis on the environmental impact of the centres, and clear planning guidance on the definition of a “green” datacentre.
She is a whirr of action: greeting, encouraging, emailing and introducing. Thursday’s protest was the biggest yet.
In John Swinney’s programme for government on Tuesday, Scotland’s equivalent to the king’s speech, the first minister said he would take a strategic approach to datacentres with “expectations around environmental sustainability, resource use, community benefit”, but stopped short of agreeing to a moratorium.
For the campaigners, this is not enough. From Dubar to Greenock, there is fierce anger at the speed and scale of the projects in the planning pipeline. At least ۲۰ are proposed so far, with more rumoured. Some are planned in the countryside not far from small villages, others next to care homes and residential housing.
Kathleen White, who is campaigning against a proposed £۲bn datacentre in Lammermuir hills in the Scottish borders, said the project did not make any sense in her area.
“We are from a small village of about a hundred people. The project is planned about a mile up the road,” she said.
“There’s a reservoir and an angling spot. It’s an upland area with dark skies. The datacentre buildings would cover eight hectares [۲۰ acres] of mostly concrete in a greenfield area. It is going to be a monstrosity.”
The rising public anger about the datacentre buildout that underpins the global AI boom is a growing threat to the UK’s strategy. Keir Starmer’s government leaned heavily on AI as a means to turbocharge a limp economy while he was prime minister.
Crucial to this were “AI growth zones”, which were areas where Britain planned to build massive AI datacentres in the hope that jobs and growth would follow. The Guardian’s investigations have called into question the numbers and reasoning behind this strategy.
The UK’s grid is strained, and proposed datacentres are meeting stiff resistance in London and elsewhere in the south of England.
This spring, British officials pushed would-be AI datacentre developers to look north – suggesting Scotland, with its renewable energy and abundant water resources, is better-equipped to support the country’s efforts to keep up in the AI race. One of the UK’s five AI growth zones will be in Lanarkshire, a rural area outside Glasgow.
Mounting public anger – and a potential moratorium – could jeopardise this pivot. But Jones rejects any suggestion that the moratorium campaign is standing in the way of progress.
“People who are campaigning locally on issues that matter to them a lot get accused of being nimbys. But this is a campaign that has national and international consequences. Datacentres are some of the biggest buildings on the planet, they use so much energy.
“Local campaigners are the most motivated to oppose them because they are a direct existential threat to the places they love, right near their homes, near hospitals, near schools.”
The opposition to large-scale datacentres has also been backed by the Scottish Greens and by Reform UK. Reform has raised concerns about the number of projects, while the Scottish Greens have backed the moratorium – echoing the campaigners’ demands for a national framework.
Ross Greer, co-leader of the Scottish Greens, who was outside Holyrood with protesters, said: “If we want to have the internet, we need datacentres and Scotland already has plenty of them.
“But some of these new hyper-scale datacentres of ۱۲۰MW to ۲۰۰MW – in total, those proposed would require more energy than all of Scotland needs at its peak at the moment. That is clearly not possible.”
The Scottish government has said that all planning authorities must notify ministers of new datacentre applications exceeding ۵۰MW within a week to help monitor their impact on infrastructure, but underscored that the centres are important for economic growth.
The public finance minister for Scotland, Hannah Mary Goodlad, said: “We must balance the economic and employment interests in developing datacentres with national energy, climate and community wealth building ambitions, which are vital to our future prosperity, as well as the potential impact on local communities.
“I am clear that voices of communities that will be affected will be central to any considerations on datacentres.”
But Jones and the campaign want more. She fears that Scotland could be overwhelmed without a formal national strategy. “We are not saying everything needs to stop for ever. But it’s moving so fast. We need a pause.”
