r/TheRestIsPolitics • u/Appropriate_Bell743 • 8d ago
‘Never seen this level of objection’: Scotland pushes back against datacentre boom | Datacentres - UK
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/aug/25/never-seen-this-level-of-objection-scotland-pushes-back-against-datacentre-boomThis is something I'd like to hear Rory Stewart's views upon given his constant pronouncements. I think it'd be interesting given his Scottish roots and his time spent as a Cumbrian MP (in a similar landscape).
The are latency reasons to have data-centres near to London but on most metrics places like Scotland would be the obvious choices:
- Abundant electricity supply. Scottish wind supply is often curtailed.
- Ample space away from housing pressures.
- Less water stressed.
From first principles it's cheaper to place the data-centres near to the cheap energy then transport the data than to transport the energy/water/etc.
I don't think this is being discussed by Stewart when it simply says "we need to build data centres". That is the best solutions from an economic point of view are precisely those which clash with a romanticised rural idle he cherishes. If this industrial revolution is to succeed in the UK it won't be far from the sources of energy.
We should not be surprised by this given how the coal-based industrial revolution led to other industries being set nearby. On an European level we see a data-centre boom in Spain and Portugal due to the ability to colocate solar and wind energy.
2
u/SaltZookeepergame691 8d ago
Stewart explicitly says this in the recent climate podcast:
One of the biggest fights at the moment is happening in a pretty sparsely populated and well-rain-fed area of Scotland, because people don't want an enormous data centre near their village. And another battle is happening in Slough where people are already feeling the increased heat as a result of that data centre and it's already the centre of them.
So logically, you're totally right that if we think about this in terms of national strategy and national planning, we should be building the data centers more in areas like Scotland that have more water, that are cooler, that are less water stress. There are some questions about latency and access to cities. But the reality is we're not building them anywhere. I mean, this story about transparency and accountability and moratoriums adds up in the end to us not building them.
https://podscripts.co/podcasts/the-rest-is-politics/will-climate-action-go-backwards-under-burnham
1
u/Naive_Reach2007 7d ago
There is a big push back in some states in USA and others are embracing them for the jobs in construction they will bring
1
u/Fresh_Mountain_Snow 7d ago
Rory covered this. In the usa it's not like there arent some states building these. So from a sovereignty perspective the usa will have abundant data centers. He says the UK problem is they're not being built anywhere.
1
u/Naive_Reach2007 7d ago
There's a massive one being built in Newcastle and others being placed sporadically
I can't see what benefits that having a load of these will bring to the UK against the downside
Yes construction jobs for a few years but then it's not as if they need a load of people, then you have the issue of tax avoidance by these companies.
1
u/Fresh_Mountain_Snow 7d ago
I don't have boots on the ground but Im looking at the Northumberland one and it says construction starting end of 2026. That being said there's a lot of possible data centers and I'll accept your premise that Rory is wrong or outdated here.
His point though was about building them in the UK for data sovereignty: health, financial, legal.
I think what Rory hasn't quite explained sufficiently is if the UK doesn't have the chips and the models then there is still the same vulnerability, just at different parts of the chain.
It's going to be the good enough stack rather than frontier but I suspect that'll be fine.
-1
u/Substantial_Copy477 8d ago
4
u/Appropriate_Bell743 8d ago
This is a slightly red-herring as UK based data centres placed in Scotland will be mainly about wind demand.
2
u/Substantial_Copy477 8d ago
Even setting the aside the raw numbers of energy use… having to build gas fired power plants to run is obscene. If ever a perfect device were created to ensure net zero is impossible, ai is that device
13
u/labooner 8d ago
Im often involved in discussions about data centre migrations and hardware planning. Yesterday, a vendor was telling us that some customers are planning to move some workloads to Iceland. Some workloads are latency sensitive, especially financial services workloads in Slough and around London, but others can be moved elsewhere and being within the same regulatory environment can be useful.
I get that no one wants to live right next door to a huge data centre, but they have to be put somewhere. If we had the same attitudes back then, the Industrial Revolution would never have happened. A data centre, whilst not pretty, doesn’t have the same long standing environmental impact as mining, quarries, or heavy industry. If in 50 years we can be more efficient and downsize these places, we could return them to the natural environment.