Scotland’s Data Centre Boom Is Selling Out Workers

Por Coll McCail — Tribune

On 29 September, CX Tech Ltd submitted plans to construct the largest data centre in the world. Their £16.5 billion proposal, to be built on the former Chapelcross nuclear site in Dumfries and Galloway, is the latest of more than twenty data centre applications lodged by developers in Scotland over the past year. The country, as one devolved government minister put it last month, is ‘open for business’.This boom didn’t happen by chance. In January 2023, the Scottish parliament unanimously approved its fourth National Planning Framework (NPF4), enshrining priority status for so-called ‘green data centres’ and ‘streamlining’ their planning process. With decision-makers waving in proposals, and no clear definition of what would make such a project ‘green’, the hyperscale data centres now in planning are 100x larger in terms of energy demand than the small data centres that currently exist across the country, according to Action to Protect Rural Scotland. The proposed Chapelcross site alone would consume the equivalent of a quarter of Scotland’s entire peak energy demand, and the country’s largest wind farm would need to run for eight years to generate just one year of electricity for the data centre.A cursory glance at the grizzly coalition of interests behind the data centre proposals leaves one with little doubt as to who stands to benefit from development. What remains of Scotland’s feudal aristocracy eyes an opportunity for profit extraction. The Duke of Roxburghe, for example, is driving forward a development on his estate in the Lammermuir hills. Billionaire brothers Sandy and James Easedale, best known for overcharging Glaswegians as the proprietors of McGill’s buses, plan to erect a huge 80,000-square-metre data centre on the West coast. Then there’s the real money. One 500 MW plan in Ayrshire, proposed just metres from the historic Hunterston castle, is bankrolled by the £360 billion US private equity firm Carlyle. Two North Lanarkshire proposals, meanwhile, will be capitalised by a selection of banks including Siemens Financial Services and Santander. That’s all before considering the big tech companies likely to use these structures following their construction.Like the independence question before it, the data centre boom is forcing contested visions of Scotland’s future out into the open. For over a decade, the SNP has implemented an economic strategy grounded in privatisation, outsourcing and centralisation without significant public outcry. As a result, American private equity firms quietly account for 39 per cent of all foreign ownership stakes in Scotland’s largest companies. But constructing the world’s largest data centre is a much more public task than inviting asset managers in through the back door, and in the process, it’s revealing the true hollowness of bourgeois nationalism’s current prospectus.The SNP has latched on to the idea that data centres will usher in the ‘next generation of industry’ to take the place of the old. The former Ravenscraig steelworks in North Lanarkshire, the Greenock IBM factory in Inverclyde and the Mossmorran Ethylene plant in Fife are all proposed hyper-scale data centre locations. At their peak, more than 10,000 workers were employed across these sites, all of which have closed over the past forty years. Data centres will employ only a fraction of that workforce.Nonetheless, the SNP has welcomed the potential construction as a way to counteract a fresh wave of job losses. As recently as 2024, the end of oil refining at Grangemouth threatened 8 per cent of Scotland’s remaining industrial base. More than 350 workers now face redundancy at the neighbouring chemical plant after Syngenta announced it would move business abroad on 1 October. Developers of the 25-hectare Auchtertool data centre site have argued that the location is ‘ideal due to the available employment’ following ExxonMobil’s decision to close Mossmorran last year.Scotland’s working class has heard the false promises of multinational investors before. In Grangemouth, Mossmorran and Greenock, workers were told by governments in Edinburgh and London that they wouldn’t be allowed to become the coal miners of the twenty-first century. The much-lauded ‘just transition’ never arrived and decisions made in boardrooms abroad brought devastation as employees’ fortunes were abandoned to the whims of the market. Applying this exact failed logic, the Scottish government has embraced the data centre as a means of developing the country’s ‘digital infrastructure’ and fostering ‘economic growth’. It’s a vision of the future which fails to offer Scotland’s post-industrial working class anything other than short-term employment, while rewarding some of the world’s wealthiest actors with unprecedented access to our natural resources.The Scottish government’s alliance with these interests is inseparable from the SNP’s mission to shrink the size of the devolved state. This project, euphemistically named ‘Public Service Reform’, threatens to lay off upwards of 15,000 workers in a series of ‘efficiency savings’ designed to fill the country’s £5 billion fiscal black hole before the end of the decade. While walking back their long-held commitment to avoid compulsory redundancies, ministers have also signalled that the expansion of AI and the automation of services will be central to the forthcoming changes. Data centres not only fail to provide lasting employment opportunities, but are likely to enable widespread workforce reduction and legitimise Holyrood’s austerity.This proposed reorganisation of the Scottish economy to service the needs of Silicon Valley lacks democratic consent. Politicians barely raised the issue during May’s Holyrood election, and proposed data centres have subsequently been met by a diverse array of local opposition, including efforts for an outright moratorium on data centre construction. While the Scottish government successfully resisted the moratorium, this fledgling movement has already forced basic concessions from Edinburgh. Every proposed data centre must now complete an environmental impact assessment, and no final planning decisions will be made before the end of this year. Yet an explicit pause, the Scottish government argued, would ‘send the wrong message’ to potential investors.To confront the politics of this agenda, environmental opposition to development is not enough. So-called ‘NIMBYism’ will not defeat the organised power of big tech, whose representatives are already hard at work in the halls of Holyrood. As The National recently revealed, companies including Microsoft, Google and Amazon, as well as industry bodies like TechUK, have lobbied more than two dozen MSPs and multiple ministers in at least 31 separate meetings since the start of 2025. Meanwhile, at a local level, the situation is even more stark. In the Scottish Borders, one of Britain’s wealthiest landowners was personally offered a private meeting with every local elected member to make the case for his £2 billion development.Local campaigns alone cannot resist such efforts to subvert democracy. Scots must contest their governing class’ vision for the future. Demonstrating the extent to which the data centre boom threatens to violate national sovereignty has the potential to galvanise opposition, draw clear lines of confrontation and challenge a broader direction which promises only precarity to the country’s workers. Otherwise, Scotland’s rural land will be put to work for the wealthy once more.

Fonte: Tribune