AI, Airdrie and the strange smell of green smoke
There are stories that make you angry because they are obviously wrong. Then there are stories that make you angrier because they are wrapped in exactly the language you want to believe: jobs, innovation, renewable energy, regeneration, Scotland finally taking a proper seat at the AI table.
This one is on my childhood doorstep. My parents family and friends still in the area. So it matters.
The proposed £8.2bn AI datacentre complex sits at Chapelhall, on the edge of Airdrie, my home town. So when I say I want this to be real, I mean it personally. Serious, well-paid, future-facing work coming to Lanarkshire is not an abstract policy win for me. It is the place I am from finally getting something it has been owed for decades.
On paper, it looked like the perfect PPP case study. Progress powered by Planet, delivering something meaningful for People. When the project was announced in January, the public promise was that the site, built by US firm CoreWeave and Scottish company DataVita, would be powered entirely by on-site renewables by 2030. Up to 1GW of it.
Wonderful.
Except 1GW is not a small claim. It is small nuclear reactor territory. DataVita’s stated plan involves 400MW of solar and 800MW of wind, which is more than one and a half times the output of Whitelee, the largest onshore windfarm in the UK. By conservative estimates it would need around 44 square kilometres of land. Nobody has shown where that land is, what consents exist, or how any of it gets built in four years.
And now, thanks to a Guardian investigation built on freedom of information requests, we know something worse. While the public story was on-site renewables, internal correspondence shows the government and the developers privately acknowledging that power provision was an unresolved issue. When the Guardian pressed, the admission finally came: the site will connect to the grid. Which means it either joins a queue currently running eight to ten years, behind homes, hospitals and hundreds of other projects, or it gets waved to the front of it.
It does not stop at the power. The 3,400 jobs figure appears to have been lifted from industry estimates for a different British datacentre and inflated because this site is bigger. A Scottish charity suggests the real number could be a hundred times smaller. The £543m community fund is not sitting in an account waiting for Lanarkshire. It is to come out of revenues DataVita may or may not ever generate. And in Newarthill, four miles down the road, energy company reps have been knocking on doors offering free solar panels and cash for properties, with nothing enforceable in writing.
None of this means AI datacentres are automatically bad, or that Scotland should turn its back on investment, or that Lanarkshire should be denied ambition. But ambition is not a substitute for honesty.
If a project needs huge amounts of electricity, say so. If it needs a grid connection, say so from day one, not when a journalist forces it out of you. If the renewables are an aspiration subject to planning, land, consents and commercial agreements, say that too. What is not acceptable is to dress uncertainty up as inevitability, then let the difficult details leak out months later through FoI requests.
Because this is how trust gets broken. Communities are asked to accept disruption. Politicians get to stand in front of big numbers. Companies get reputational shine. The word renewable gets sprinkled over everything like ethical glitter. And the people who actually live there, in Chapelhall and Newarthill and Airdrie, are left to work out which promises were real.
The maddening part is that the questions were never hard. How much energy will the site require at full build-out? How much will genuinely be generated on site, and where? What planning permissions exist today? Will this project jump the grid queue ahead of homes and hospitals? What happens if the renewable infrastructure is delayed or never built? And who signed off the public claims in the first place?
These are the minimum questions. Some of them have now been answered, and the answers are worse than the silence was.
For me, this is the real PPP test. Progress cannot be built on PR. Planet cannot be used as a slogan. People cannot be expected to nod along while the numbers quietly fail in the background.
If the project is viable, prove it. If the renewables are real, show the plan. If the claims were overstated, correct them publicly, in the same font size as the announcement. And if this was sold to the public on a promise those involved knew was not deliverable, then someone needs to be held properly accountable.
Airdrie has heard big promises before. It does not need another one. It needs jobs, investment, truth and a future that can stand up in daylight.
People. Planet. Progress.