Revealed: landmark Scottish AI project has no prospect of meeting renewables promise

A central plank of the project’s viability was its ability to power itself. Composite: Guardian Design/Reuters View image in fullscreen A central plank of the project’s viability was its ability to power itself. Composite: Guardian Design/Reuters Revealed: landmark Scottish AI project has no prospect of meeting renewables promise Exclusive: Government and developers privately acknowledged Lanarkshire datacentre site had power provision ‘issue’ ‘It’s smoke and mirrors’: hope turns to fear in Scottish village chosen for AI datacentre What are Britain’s AI growth zones and are the plans feasible or ‘complete bunk’? A landmark AI development billed as delivering jobs and prosperity has misrepresented its plans to channel a nuclear reactor’s worth of power to a site in rural Scotland, a Guardian investigation has found. When it was announced in January, the government promised that an £8.2bn AI datacentre complex in Lanarkshire – built – would be powered entirely from on-site renewables and built by 2030. The AI datacentre complex represented a large part of Britain’s ambitions to keep up in the global AI race . A central plank of the project’s viability was its ability to power itself. But documents obtained through freedom of information (FoI) requests and analysis of public records suggest the datacentre has no prospect of meeting that goal. The Guardian obtained internal correspondence showing that the government and the site’s developers, even as they publicly promised that the Lanarkshire site would have up to 1GW of “new energy infrastructure”, were privately acknowledging that the site had an “issue” with “power provision” and that this would not happen. In response to questions from the Guardian, the government said the Lanarkshire complex would connect to the grid. This means it will either join a years-long queue or be expedited ahead of hundreds of other projects also vying for a connection. A government spokesperson said the site’s needs would still be met “overwhelmingly” with renewables. The findings raise critical doubts over the UK’s ability to confront the key question now facing the world’s massive AI buildout: how to provide the extraordinary energy required to make it plausible. ‘At best indicative, at worst complete bunk’ AI datacentres are, essentially, buildings full of very specialised silicon chips. The chips do the calculations that underpin artificial intelligence models. The world’s biggest tech companies are now ploughing hundreds of billions of dollars into the buildout of AI datacentres.