‘It’s smoke and mirrors’: hope turns to fear in Scottish village chosen for AI datacentre

New Delhi, India Jul 6, 2026 ALN: The promise was that a Scottish community would be transformed by massive investment and empowered to chase “the jobs of the future.” Instead, local people in Lanarkshire fear they may have to sell their properties and lose green belt land because of the errors of a badly planned AI datacentre complex, even as those jobs and investments never arrive.

Late last year, representatives of Oakes Energy Services began to knock on doors in Newarthill, a village east of Glasgow. In letters reviewed by residents, they invited locals to individual meetings. They spoke about plans for a solar farm and made offers: free solar panels, tree planting, or even cash for their properties.

“It was a sweetener: don’t oppose this and you’ll be OK, kind of thing,” said Diane Davidson, a resident. “None of these sweeteners are enforceable; there’s nothing written down.”

Two months later, the government chose Lanarkshire as a key site for the UK’s AI plans, announcing a multibillion-pound development called an “AI growth zone.” The project is to be built by the US company CoreWeave and DataVita, an arm of a Glasgow real-estate firm.

What will be built in Lanarkshire are AI datacentres: essentially, large buildings full of specialised silicon chips. These chips perform the calculations that underpin AI models. All over the world, tech companies are investing hundreds of billions of dollars into building AI datacentres, banking on the idea that AI will transform the global economy and that the datacentres will pay for themselves.

To be successful, these companies need to quickly erect giant infrastructure projects in communities such as Newarthill.

When the announcement came, the press release suggested a sprawling site that would bring “datacentres, supportive infrastructure, and a renewables park.”

Promises accompanied this announcement: 3,400 new “high-value” jobs and a community fund to inject “up to £543 million” into local programmes over the next few years.

Initially, the community was not concerned. “The datacentre itself is not much. It’s just a big imposing building,” said Davidson. However, they soon realised the project would require vast amounts of energy—and therefore vast amounts of land.

“The quantities it would need, it would definitely approach into our area,” Davidson said. “It was like: oh, crikey. It was just growing arms and legs the more we looked into it.”

Concerns began to mount regarding Oakes Energy Services and another company, Locogen, which recently submitted a planning application for a solar farm adjacent to the site on behalf of a larger international energy group.

An investigation has examined public plans for the AI growth zone in Lanarkshire, one key site in the government’s ambitious push to bring massive AI development to communities across Britain. It finds that these plans appear to misrepresent the government’s—and DataVita’s—actual intentions for the development of the site.

In particular, the government and DataVita publicly stated that the site would be powered by huge quantities of “on-site” renewable energy. However, when pressed, they admitted that the AI growth zone would actually connect to Britain’s straining grid.

What remains unclear is how much renewable energy the site still plans to build. DataVita has claimed it will have 1GW of power, supplied by energy parks connected directly to its datacentres. This would require, by conservative estimates, 44 square kilometers of land near its site. Currently, DataVita appears to have less than a tenth of this.

There is no apparent connection between Oakes Energy Services and DataVita, but the appetite of both companies for energy parks has led Davidson and others to fear that the land needed to make up the difference will be theirs.

Across the UK, a promised AI boom is driving a speculative rush as owners of industrial sites, investors, and property developers try to cash in on promises of datacentre investment. This has led to hundreds of companies applying to build datacentres, with investors strategizing on ways to turn empty land or old industrial sites into more productive assets.

Oakes Energy Services did not respond to a query regarding their plans. Locogen stated it had no connection to DataVita, the developer of the AI growth zone, and was not involved in any pre-application consultations with local people. DataVita has also claimed it has no commercial connection with Locogen or Oakes.

However, materials that DataVita submitted to the government about its plans to develop the site suggest it does plan to use the surrounding area, solar farms or not, to power its datacentre. An audit conducted by the Scottish government, obtained under freedom of information (FoI) rules, indicates that DataVita’s proposal “leverages the region’s strength as a renewable energy hub by proposing that available, adjacent land at both sites is used to build renewable energy parks that will feed the hyperscalers and AI innovation parks.”

Local residents have pressed DataVita and the energy companies about their development plans but have received little information. In a meeting in April, representatives of the energy companies refused to answer questions about who their customer was, according to Meghan Gallacher, a member of the Scottish Parliament representing the region.

“I don’t believe in relation to the planning proposal that the company has been honest in relation to how it’s engaged with local residents,” she said. “There has been, in my view, some doubts in relation to the information that’s been forthcoming, the questions that they’re willing to answer.”

DataVita responded that all proposals were subject to local and national planning legislation through an open public process at every stage, and that it welcomed feedback and engagement throughout.

The Lanarkshire growth zone has reawakened old fears in Airdrie, just over four miles from Newarthill. For a decade, local residents fought a proposal to develop a community park on land owned by the daughters of the late Tory minister William Whitelaw.

In 2017, a group of prominent Scottish businesspeople announced plans to turn the site into a multimillion-pound luxury housing development called EuroPark. Among them were Graeme Souness, a former Scotland football player, and members of the Gillespie family, a local mining dynasty.

Last June, Davidson noted, the community felt they had won a victory: the site’s plans were rebuffed by local authorities and again on appeal to the Scottish government. Now, it feels that victory was temporary.

Ann Glen, a local historian and author, remarked, “Now we’re back here, and instead of this EuroPark, we have a datacentre.”

Davidson expressed the community's anxiety: “Everybody is quite agitated and quite worried about it. Nobody is getting any benefit out of it. They are worried about their property values going down.”

The potential upsides of the Lanarkshire development for the people of Airdrie appear thinner than the government has announced. Reports indicate there is no money currently in the £543 million community fund; rather, this is planned to come from DataVita revenues, if they materialize.

Meanwhile, the Scottish charity Action to Protect Rural Scotland (APRS) filed an FoI request to the government to understand how it arrived at the figure of 3,400 jobs. They found that the figure stemmed from industry estimates for another site—Cambois in Northumberland—multiplied to account for the fact that Lanarkshire is a larger site.

APRS concluded that the industry estimates were inflated and suggested there was no evidence that the Lanarkshire site could directly employ hundreds of people as the press release suggests. Instead, most of the jobs the site could create would be temporary construction jobs.

“Our conclusion is that the UK government figures given in their press release could be a hundred times bigger than the probable jobs that the datacentre will create,” wrote APRS.

Despite this, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology stands by its estimate, which includes figures for roles created in the datacentre’s construction phase, its supply chain, and the wider regional economy.

The local people who are supposed to be the recipients of this promised largesse may be those who pay the steepest cost. North Lanarkshire includes some of Scotland’s most deprived regions, towns that were once centered around coal and steelworks, and that now have some of the worst health outcomes in western Europe, according to Glen.

Dozens of residents have expressed their fears in online forums and on North Lanarkshire’s portal about how the energy developments and the datacentre are proceeding, and the confusing and contradictory information being put out about the future of their land.

Glen stated that the entire policy surrounding the AI growth zone was condescending to the “hardworking people” who were supposed to benefit from the project. “It’s again smoke and mirrors. Smoke and mirrors,” she said. “People think that—jobs—oh, phenomenal, what will it be like? A new age! But they’re being misled in a way; there are no jobs. They don’t realize to what extent they’re being conned.”

The announcement “gives you the impression of poor aspiration. Poor aspiration. Just a job. Anything will do.”