EDINBURGH (The Thursday Times) — Thousands of people marched through Edinburgh on Saturday against plans for large-scale AI data centres across Scotland, demanding that communities be given a say before any more of the power-hungry sites are approved.
The protesters, put at about 6,000 by one estimate, gathered at the top of the Royal Mile and marched down to the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood. Some came in costume, and many carried hand-painted placards with slogans such as “We cannae drink data” and “AI? Aye right”.
The march was timed to coincide with the global day of action held around the COP31 climate talks in Antalya, Türkiye. Scotland marks the day every year with a climate protest, but organisers said this year’s march was focused on data centres.
Campaign groups from Cockenzie, Dunbar, Larbert, Ravenscraig, North Ayrshire, Aberdeenshire, and the Borders travelled to the capital to join it, many of them opposing data centres planned near their own towns.
“Concerns going unheard”
Kat Jones, director of Action to Protect Rural Scotland, said the march was “sending a clear message” to the Scottish government. “They have to stop ignoring the calls from civil society to be involved in discussions around the future of hyperscale AI data centres in Scotland,” she said.
Kim Pratt, a senior campaigner at Friends of the Earth Scotland, said the proposed sites would “double Scotland’s electricity demand and make our energy bills more expensive” and undermine the country’s climate commitments. “The Scottish Government has failed to explain why it thinks AI data centres are needed in Scotland and how it will protect people from their harms,” she said.
The Scottish Greens and several campaign groups have called for a moratorium on large data centres, arguing that they could undermine climate targets and put extra pressure on the country’s renewable energy supply.
From 12 megawatts to 1,000
Figures published in September by the National Energy System Operator, which runs Britain’s grid, show 28 data centre proposals waiting for a grid connection in Scotland, with a combined demand of 8.9 gigawatts. That is more than twice Scotland’s current peak electricity demand in winter.
Scotland’s largest data centre at present is thought to be DataVita’s site in Airdrie, North Lanarkshire, with a capacity of 12 megawatts. A site planned at Chapelcross in Dumfries and Galloway would have a capacity of 1,000 megawatts, which would make it one of the largest in the world.
Kim Cairns, who campaigns against the Chapelcross plan, said her community was worried about noise, road closures, and access during construction, and about the noise the centre would make once it was running. “At the moment it’s green fields with sheep and cows in it. It’s going to be a monstrosity on the environment,” she said.
Campaigners also pointed to a report by the transparency group Spotlight on Corruption, which found that 84% of the meetings UK ministers held with outside groups on data centres were with the private sector, and only two were with community groups.
Government says guidance is coming
The Scottish government said it would soon publish new planning guidance on data centres and was developing a strategy to make sure they deliver the greatest possible “public benefit”.
Alyn Smith, Scotland’s innovation minister, has called data centres “the whisky bonds of the AI sector” and described some of the debate around them as “wild”. “You’d think there wasn’t a planning system at all,” he said. “Comparing a really bad data centre in the middle of the Utah desert doesn’t track through to what we’re going to have in Scotland.”
Danny Quinn, managing director of DataVita, said the technology was becoming “a critical part of every developed economy”. Countries needed their own data centres “to run AI within our own countries and our own regions without being dependent on simply consuming it from another country”, he said.
The Edinburgh march is part of a wider wave of protests against data centres across Europe, as governments race to attract investment in AI while communities question the cost to their land, water, and power bills. More than 100 groups described by campaigners as big polluters have been admitted to COP31.
