“What they're looking for is what they call empty space. We call it a place that we live.”
Pivot to AI · October 2026
Asked why data centre developers are targeting Scotland, Jones says it is a speculative race for cheap land, room to expand and energy. She goes on to question where the power will come from when the wind isn't blowing.
Transcript
Potentially, yes. So, and this one that's going to be in Fife is obviously just going to be AI because nobody puts a data center that big in Scotland for any other reason.
Why are they hitting Scotland?
Well, I mean, I think it's just a bubble of speculation. I think there's been a bit of a sort of race to find space, essentially. And what they're looking for is what they call empty space. We call it a place that we live. You know, they're looking for lots of space. They're looking for cheap land. They want to be able to expand as well. They often would do it modular. They're looking for large areas that you can't really find in brownfield sites. They're looking for huge, huge spaces. And cheap land, they're looking for energy. And, you know, Scotland is being touted as a place with lots of energy. Now, we do have a lot of energy when the wind's blowing. When the wind isn't blowing, the energy has to come from somewhere else. And often it's coming up from the south. So these data centers are going to be using loads of energy, but they're going to be using it 24-7. So where's it going to come from? Well, hopefully they're not going to fire up their diesel generators, but I suspect they'll have to be bringing vast amounts in from thermal power stations in England up to north to power these things.
Yeah, in America, it's terrible. Elon Musk's Colossus data centers, where he's literally just put 50 odd gas turbines pumping out nitrous oxide and measurably increasing the nitrous oxide levels in South Memphis. Oh, that's the poor kids. I don't care what my Claude, you know, it's awful. We literally know what it does and we know how little. One of the key things about this is these people don't care about you and me.
Yes, well, the thing is that with Scotland is that these sort of data center developers that are the ones that are building them really aren't in Scotland yet. There's only one of the big US companies, which is Coreweave, that has an agreement with a data centre developer called Data Vita. Now, they run a data centre at 24 megawatts in Lanarkshire, and they have been awarded this AI growth zone status, which is a UK government-mandated sort of you can get cheaper power for your data centre, come here, you know, invite, invite all kinds of things. And it's a partnership between Data Vita and the UK government. So they're going to build, they've got another data centre planned, which will be 120 megawatts that is kind of being planned just now. But the aim is it's got to get to 500 megawatts by 2030. That was the aim of the AI growth zones. So that's the only one that's got any kind of backing. And as far as we can see, Coreweave hasn't given them a huge amount of money because they've got a lot of government underwriting of loans. They've got a loan from the UK government. They've got an underwriting of loan from the Scottish bank, the National Bank. So, you know, that's the only one. The rest of these developers are really just middlemen. They are property developers that are looking to uplift the value of land. And the two main ones, so Apertura, that's got eight, as far as we can see, in planning portals, totaling absolute like 2,000 megawatts or something, or perhaps even more, they are basically from a planning consultancy. Like they know how to get planning permission through. And the same with ILI, which is one that's got three in the planning systems. And they also are experts on planning. And that's where they've come from. And they've come through doing battery storage and some other renewable developments. And now they're coming into data centers.
Yeah. This 24-megawatt one, that actually exists now, does it?