Heading to a town near you... vast US-funded data centres that need more power than a small country and have sparked a Wild West-style land grab, with campaigners now fearing they could prove a toxic menace to Scotland's public health

Published: 22:15, 10 July 2026 | Updated: 22:15, 10 July 2026 If her fellow protesters hadn’t seen it with their own eyes, they might have assumed AI trickery had played a part in placing a famous face in their midst. Yet, standing on a sodden pavement in solidarity with their common purpose was the unmistakeable, if unexpected, presence of singing sensation Susan Boyle. Standing shoulder to shoulder with around 200 other campaigners, the quietly reclusive chart star, known to millions as ‘SuBo’, defiantly held up a placard declaring: ‘Say No to Larbert AI Data Centre’. The notice added: ‘Stop selling Scotland to Big Tech.’ The confrontational tone struck a discordant note with SuBo’s normally disarming public persona, but something had clearly riled her to such an extent she was ready to take to the streets to vent her feelings. The object of her ire exists, for now, only in the virtual world of glossy architect’s plans lodged with planning officials at Falkirk Council. But should it become reality, opponents fear that the hulking monster proposed for the edge of their small town could generate a perfect storm of toxic air pollution, relentless noise and a potentially destabilising demand on the local power grid. Thousands have already submitted objections to proposals to construct the so-called ‘hyperscale’ AI data centre – a 50-acre computer processing facility capable of hoovering up more power than 300,000 homes. It is one of a string of data centre planning applications that have sprung up across the Central Belt, as America’s AI giants, fresh from carpeting their homeland in these eye-poppingly vast digital hubs, have started a Scottish land grab to meet their insatiable desire for energy to power their servers. Research by the environmental charity, Action for the Protection of Rural Scotland (APRS), has revealed the staggering extent to which developers are speculatively buying up real estate to profit from the demands of ‘Big Tech’. Former Britain's Got Talent star Susan Boyle at a protest over an AI data centre near Larbert, Stirlingshire An interactive map on the APRS website shows the extent to which the densely-populated Central Belt is now peppered with plans in support of the seemingly inexorable march of artificial intelligence. ‘I found myself with no choice but to speak up,’ said Ms Boyle, 65, explaining her activism. ‘I have friends in America who have these centres near their homes and it’s soul-destroying for them.’ The singer told The Scottish Sun: ‘Our beautiful country does not need to be ruined by corporate giants using up our resources for their gain. I hope the whole of Scotland unites and protects our country from these unnecessary monstrosities. I hope John Swinney puts the people first.’ There are 24 live applications already in the planning pipeline which, if they all went ahead, would guzzle an estimated 6,200MW of energy. To put that in context, it is 50 per cent more than the peak winter demand for the whole of Scotland, according to the National Energy System Operator (Neso).‘It’s a vast amount of electricity,’ said APRS director, Dr Kat Jones. ‘It’s hard to see how this can happen; you can’t connect all of that to the grid. Unless you build a lot of gas power stations or nuclear power stations to power it.’ It is by no means clear how many will be built, but the AI lobby does have heavyweight backers in both the Scottish and UK governments, who have made clear they believe data centres are central to the country’s economic future. Labour has gone as far as designating data centres as ‘Critical National Infrastructure’ – essential services on a par with water and power companies that will be given high level prioritisation and protection. But critics fear the frantic race to jump on the rapidly advancing artificial intelligence bandwagon has left local authorities under huge pressure to rush momentous decisions without the benefit of clear regulation and guidance or sufficient consideration of any health or environmental impacts. That uncertainty has sparked a furious backlash as communities fear the AI ‘juggernaut’ will run roughshod over planning policy and an energy network struggling to keep up with technology. There are now growing calls from across the political spectrum, for a moratorium on approving any new AI data centres until that guidance is in place. While First Minister John Swinney has so far resisted a moratorium, his party ramped up the pressure after passing a motion at a recent national council meeting demanding a temporary ban. The news has given campaigners fresh resolve. ‘This isn’t just a single village issue,’ said SuBo’s manager Geraldine Easton, who like her famous client also lives in the Larbert area and turned up to protest. ‘It’s a universal issue.’ Around 200 protesters joined Miss Boyle at the protest last month amid rising fears over data centres for artificial intelligence Quite how universal was brought home during a rally at Holyrood last month organised by campaigners from Larbert, Dunbar in East Lothian, Hermiston and the Gyle in Edinburgh, Hunterston in Inverclyde, Auchtertool in Fife, and Chapelhall in North Lanarkshire, near the site of an £8.2billion ‘AI Growth Zone’. They have had to become mini-experts on planning law, electricity generation, and the National Grid. They are now familiar with developers such as Apatura, Intelligent Land Investments (ILI) Group, and VitaData and their links to global tech players like Google, Microsoft and Amazon. And they are better informed than most how hyperscale AI data centres operate. According to Dr Jones, they are a very different beast from the standard – and much smaller - data centres that already manage our everyday internet needs like streaming movies, online banking, or booking flights. Called ‘co-location’ data centres, those work, essentially, like big digital filing cabinets and use regular CPU computer chips to store data and send it to your phone, TV or laptop only when you ask for it. Between them, the 15 co-location data centres in Scotland use a total of 38MW of electricity. That amount of energy is predictable and manageable, she said. What Apatura wants to build in Larbert’s Glenbervie Business Park is not a digital filing cabinet, but more like a high-powered industrial factory built solely to ‘engineer’ artificial intelligence and run autonomous AI agents, such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Microsoft Copilot. These use highly specialised computing power – a single AI query can require billions of calculations. That means the buildings that house the necessary hardware – hall upon hall of GPU chips – now need to be so much bigger and more numerous. Dr Jones said residents were angry that huge industrial developments with unknown impacts are being imposed on them. ‘The planning system is set up to favour developers as, unlike them, objectors have no right of appeal and the industry has the support of both the Scottish and the UK Governments,’ she said. APRS said the moratorium was needed ‘until research on the impacts is done and our governance and policy meant to protect people and the environment can catch up with this AI juggernaut’. The fast pace has been set by Silicon Valley bigwigs pledging £150billion for AI data centres here after building them in the US got harder. A recent Mail investigation found a wave of anti-AI sentiment sweeping across the States, as a recent Gallup survey found 71 per cent of Americans now oppose the building of an AI data centre in their community. Two US states, Seattle – home to Microsoft and Amazon – and New York, have unilaterally imposed moratoria on new AI data centre builds until concerns such as overheating and air, noise, and water pollution are addressed. Unbowed, the tech barons insist AI will transform the global economy, and once it does, AI data centres will pay for themselves. AI will, they contend, also drastically improve our lives by enabling innovations such as cures for cancer and accelerating the development of new drugs. Demonstrators have also gathered outside the Scottish Parliament over concerns about the centres Developers emphasise the benefits to local economies in generating hundreds of new jobs and millions in inward investment. Proponents also argue that Scotland is the perfect location for data centres, as its abundance of renewable energy means the warehouses can be run on clean ‘green’ energy. Opponents are sceptical about such claims, while some are more concerned with the potential impact AI developments may have on their everyday lives. With data halls 25m tall, Apatura’s sprawling Larbert structure will dominate this quiet village, whose 12,000 residents enjoy spectacular views to the Ochil Hills, according to leading campaigner Michael Maciocia. At a recent residents’ meeting, the 69-year-old, who used to work in the semi-conductor industry, played a recording of an incessant low frequency whine from a similar facility in the States. He says his neighbours could expect to endure the same sort of intrusive round-the-clock noise if their development goes ahead. The constant hum comes from the heavy-duty, continuous cooling systems AI data centres need to protect their specialist AI chips, which create so much heat they would melt otherwise. By contrast, co-location data centres produce far less heat and are relatively quiet. Apatura stressed in an online consultation that its Larbert facility would be ‘purpose-built to the highest technical, environmental and safety standards’. Its plans appear to rely on 200 diesel-powered back-up generators to power and cool the plant in an emergency. Campaigners say the company’s own documents show that required regular testing of the generators would cause 288 tons of toxic nitrous oxide and nitrogen dioxide emissions a year. This would rank the development, designed as a ‘green data centre’ by Apatura, among the top ten emitters of exhaust fumes in Scotland, ahead of Shell’s natural gas liquids plant in Mossmorran, Fife, and the gas-fired Peterhead power station in Aberdeenshire. Furthermore, added Mr Maciocia: ‘In an emergency, these generators will consume 80,000 litres or two 40ft lorries worth of diesel an hour. There’s nowhere in the plan mentioning where these huge amounts will be stored. ‘And we can’t see any modelling on explosion or fire risks. And there is the Forth Valley Hospital, a 56-bed care home, a nursery school and a hotel all within 500 metres of this site.’ To place an industrial site of this scale so close to where people lived was ‘lunacy’, he said. There is another, fundamental concern that strikes at the existential heart of AI: ‘These search engines like Google want to encompass all the world’s knowledge, but AI could be used to much better effect in smaller systems for particular tasks like helping medicine,’ said Mr Maciocia. He was uncomfortable, too, with the less savoury aspects of AI including allowing users to manipulate and fake images: ‘This is the Wild West; there’s no regulation here,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t have to be this general purpose, slop-generating system that these centres will serve.’ Falkirk Council has a blanket rule not to comment on ongoing planning cases, while Apatura did not respond to requests for comment. Communities at the sharp end, by contrast, have no trouble finding their voice. Tiny Auchtertool, population just 650, is fighting plans for a 600MW facility – double the size of Larbert’s and one of the world’s largest – on its doorstep. Covering the size of 100 football pitches and featuring six massive data halls the height of eight double-decker buses, the £5billion ‘data campus’ dwarfs the village. ILI Group named it Cato, which handily for placard-waving protesters, rhymes with ‘No’. ‘We normally deal with things like potholes, speeding through the village, litter, sometimes dog fouling,’ said Andrea Cail, chair of Auchtertool Community Council. ‘Over the last four years we have had two planning applications across our desk; one for a large solar farm and one for battery storage, but this is bigger than anything we have had to grapple with before,’ she added. Campaigners have raised fears over noise and environmental pollution generated by the giant structures ‘Shell at Mossmorran has been here for 40 years and we have wind farms, so we are surrounded and in the middle of it will be this massive energy consumer. ‘We do get the need for green energy, but we will have generated all this brilliant clean energy for Scotland and this centre will guzzle it all up.’ She said the biggest challenge was trying to nail down concrete details in Hamilton-based ILI Group’s application, which is currently with Fife Council. ‘It’s all modelled and hypothetical and based on assumptions and possibilities. If the application gets planning in principle, whoever then wants to come into the site can change it to suit themselves. That’s a major worry.’ Aside from worries about flood risks identified in a Fife Council report and fears about air and heat pollution, a noise assessment concluded even with sound dampening measures, there would be a ‘significant adverse impact’ in the village, especially at night. ‘At night, we can just hear the noise from Mossmorran, which is three miles away. This facility would be less than half a mile from our village and it’s enormous,’ said Ms Cail. She said a drawing in the planning application showed the data campus looming over Auchtertool: ‘It makes Mossmorran looks like a dot on the landscape.’ More widely is the concern that local councils were expected to make such important decisions without any national oversight. ‘That cannot be right,’ said Ms Cail. ‘It might be that Scotland needs one or two of these hyperscale AI data centres, but it doesn’t need 15 or 20.’ Questions loom over AI’s draining demands on power resources. At present, Scotland often generates more wind power than it can use locally and grid constraints mean that wind farms often have to be paid to switch off to avoid generating too much power. So why not use that curtailed power for AI, runs the argument? But the wind power being developed in Scotland is earmarked for decarbonising the UK’s existing energy demand and the grid is being upgraded to handle the full capacity. So the benefits of using data centres to absorb additional demand would be ‘short-term’, said Keith Bell, Professor in Electrical Engineering at Strathclyde University. ILI Group – a company with a background in clean energy development and battery storage projects – argues that upgrading work will take years and so-called curtailment payments cost the country hundreds of millions of pounds, which lands on household bills. The firm said demand for AI centres ‘belongs where the clean power is’. Which is why it has two developments in the pipeline at Newhouse, Lanarkshire, and at Hurlford, in Ayrshire. The three sites’ combined energy demand is 1540MW, and while ILI says it aims to prioritise ‘zero-carbon’ options to power its facilities, its engineering specifications ‘have yet to be finalised’. ILI insists its Cato campus would be a ‘game-changer’ for Fife, citing independent analysis by BiGGAR Economics that forecasts £105million would be generated for the local economy during construction and around 120 permanent jobs would be created – a much-needed boon as the ageing Mossmorran site nears its end. A map shows the extent to which the densely-populated Central Belt is now peppered with plans in support of the seemingly inexorable march of artificial intelligence. Job numbers have long been a bone of contention as many US facilities require only a skeleton staff on-site to maintain the computer equipment inside. On the flipside, the loss of jobs because of AI’s growing influence in the workplace is never part of the discussion. But ILI Group CEO Mark Wilson doubled down on its renewable energy ethos on The Stooshie podcast, insisting any future operator would be tied to the same standards. He said: ‘We will not be selling to any company that is not credible, because I would not do that for our reputation, and it just wouldn’t be the right thing to do.’ His company even offered The Mail a definition of a ‘green’ data centre: guided by five principles, they should be powered by renewables, light on natural resources, generous to their surroundings, offer real benefit to the community and be ‘open and transparent’ throughout the project’s lifetime. Put like that, it is a wonder the residents of Auchtertool can find anything to complain about. And yet, as data centre applications proliferate, so do the number of campaign groups. In West Edinburgh, mother-of-two Sarah Finlay is leading objections to Apatura’s Wester Hermiston development, a 200MW hyperscale centre planned for a 60-acre greenbelt site close to Heriot-Watt University. ‘Most of us are just totally dumbstruck by the whole thing. The nearest house will be just 10 metres away from the data centre. Can you imagine living in that house? The noise of these things is unbelievable and a lot of older people live in that area.’ Ms Finlay said: ‘It’s a joke to call them “green” when these absolute monstrosities of industrial tech land on greenbelt land burning up electricity and belching out toxic emissions and noise pollution. ‘And Apatura had the cheek to say they would put a playpark on site – there’s no way I would take my kids to that playpark!’ She added: ‘The planning process at council level has not kept pace with technology – it is simply not fit for purpose.’ The planning authority responsible, City of Edinburgh Council, which along with East Ayrshire Council backs a moratorium, clearly agrees. It stepped back from trying to impose a local ban after being warned it may not be legally enforceable. Now the baton has been handed to the First Minister, who is already feeling the heat after every party, even his own, has called for a pause. Shortly before Holyrood went into summer recess, Mr Swinney admitted he was giving ‘active consideration’ to whether planning guidance was now needed ‘to balance the rapid expansion of hyperscale data centres with national energy and climate goals, which are vital to our future prosperity’. Finding the words to satisfy both sides in this increasingly fraught battle might prove a challenge even for an army of AI chatbots.