\u201cThe Scottish government is inching towards a moratorium<\/a>,\u201d said Kat Jones, director of the Edinburgh-based charity Action to Protect Rural Scotland. \u201cMSPs return to parliament next week, after a summer in their constituencies where they have been hearing the concerns of local people about proposed hyperscale datacentres. They will be expecting action.\u201d<\/p>\n For months, UK officials have been encouraging would-be datacentre developers to consider Scotland. In April, Fintan Slye, the chief executive of the UK\u2019s National Energy System Operator (Neso), told a London audience to look north<\/a>: \u201cIf in the audience you have a big datacentre and you want to go to Scotland, please come talk to me, we will help you,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cThey are coming up here because we are energy-rich, and we are water-rich, and England is in drought and the grid is struggling,\u201d said Torrance.<\/p>\n But Scotland<\/a>, it turns out, isn\u2019t having it. The proposal for Auchtertool is a behemoth: drawings show the 600MW datacentre towering over the village, dwarfing old stone houses and blocking the view of fields and forests.<\/p>\n \u201cHow can you possibly ask people to accept that?\u201d Torrance said. \u201cYou can see why the public is objecting.\u201d<\/p>\n Scotland has already started to take steps that could mean the Auchtertool datacentre \u2013 and dozens of others \u2013 may never be built.<\/p>\n This week, Scotland\u2019s minister for public finance issued a new set of directions to regulate datacentres in the country. The first of these requires planning authorities to notify the government when they receive an application for a datacentre larger than 50MW \u2013 in other words, anything more than a twelfth of the size of Auchtertool.<\/p>\n Interior of a datacentre. Campaigners at Action to Protect Rural Scotland allege that ministers have failed to include the emissions from hyperscale AI datacentres in work looking at their impact on climate targets. Photograph: Yui Mok\/PA<\/p>\n The minister has also required that certain datacentres, including Auchtertool, submit an environmental impact assessment. Their developers had previously argued that they were exempt.<\/p>\n In some senses, these are \u201cobvious, bare-minimum\u201d rules, said Jones. They mean that Scotland is starting to closely follow developments that stand to drastically reshape the landscape and resource consumption of the entire country.<\/p>\n The fact that giant datacentres can currently be built across Britain with little strategy and without government knowledge is a feature of an old and idiosyncratic planning regime; no one foresaw that giant tech companies would wish to litter the world with buildings the size of large monuments.<\/p>\n But these restrictions are just the start. The Scottish parliament will return at the end of this month. Three days after the session commences, in early September, campaigners plan a massive demonstration against datacentres in Edinburgh.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Sign up to TechScape<\/p>\n A weekly dive in to how technology is shaping our lives<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n That demonstration will aim higher. Campaigners have been calling for Scotland to put in place a full moratorium on datacentre development, to give the public and authorities time to examine the plans that are in the pipeline. This summer, the national council of the Scottish National party passed a motion to freeze<\/a> all new datacentre projects that have not received planning permission.<\/p>\n Several weeks ago, Police Scotland warned another datacentre developer that public anger over datacentres could lead to incursions and posed a security risk, in what appeared to be the first-ever such warning in the UK.<\/p>\n A moratorium on datacentres could soon become policy. At the least, \u201cyou\u2019ll see a lot more restrictions \u2013 and stronger guidance,\u201d said Torrance.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/1782850452_383_500.jpg\")
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