A landmark AI development billed as delivering jobs and prosperity has misrepresented its plans to channel a nuclear reactor’s worth of power to a site in rural Scotland, a Guardian investigation has found. The £8.2bn datacentre complex in Lanarkshire – built by the US firm CoreWeave and the Scottish company DataVita – was promised by the government in January to be powered entirely from on-site renewables and built by 2030. But documents obtained through freedom of information requests show that government and developers privately acknowledged an “issue” with “power provision”, and the site now has no prospect of meeting that goal.
The revelation comes as Google and Amazon, two of the world’s biggest tech companies, disclosed soaring emissions in their annual sustainability reports last week, driven by the construction of new datacentres, fuel used for deliveries, and expanding electricity usage. Google’s total carbon emissions climbed 25% year-over-year, and Amazon’s shot up 16%. Both companies have pledged to reach net-zero carbon emissions, but their massive investments in artificial intelligence are making those goals slip out of reach. “The environmental footprint of the data centers that power AI is growing, creating a dual challenge: managing that environmental footprint while simultaneously building infrastructure to meet growing demand and realize AI’s full potential,” reads Google’s report. Amazon said: “We recognize that the path to being a more sustainable company is not a straight line. Though our emissions increased in 2025, we remain steadfast in our commitment to sustainability.”
“Scottish AI datacentre scheme abandons renewables goal as Google and Amazon emissions surge from AI energy demands.”
Microsoft, which will release its sustainability report in the coming weeks, has already documented a 23% increase in emissions compared with a 2020 baseline. The three companies fashioned themselves climate leaders in the previous decade, when investors prioritised ESG, but their desire for huge amounts of power to win the AI arms race has outstripped their commitments to sustainability.
The Lanarkshire complex represented a large part of Britain’s ambitions to keep up in the global AI race by building the infrastructure that underpins artificial intelligence. A central plank of the project’s viability was its ability to power itself. Now the government says it will connect to the grid, either joining a years-long queue or being expedited ahead of hundreds of other projects. A government spokesperson said the site’s needs would still be met “overwhelmingly” with renewables. But the findings raise critical doubts over the UK’s ability to confront the key question facing the AI buildout: how to provide the extraordinary energy required to make it plausible. The question of whether AI is a boom or bubble now largely rests on huge infrastructure projects such as Lanarkshire.