Thousands of people joined a protest in Edinburgh against large-scale AI data centres, assembling at the top of the Royal Mile before marching toward the Scottish Parliament, the BBC reported. Demonstrators carried slogans including "AI data centres threaten humanity" and "AI data centres: costing the Earth," and some came in costume. The march is part of a wider European wave of protests over the environmental impact of the sites. The Scottish government said it would soon publish new planning guidance on data centres and was developing a strategy to maximise "public benefit." Innovation Minister Alyn Smith has called data centres "the whisky bonds of the AI sector," a comparison protesters rejected.
Some of those who turned out were fighting particular proposals, including sites at Cockenzie in East Lothian and Larbert in Falkirk. Kim Cairns, a campaigner with Say No To Chapelcross AI Data Centre, told BBC Scotland she worried about noise, road closures and access during construction, and about noise once a centre was running. "It's not going to enrich anybody's lives. For Chapelcross it's the sheer size of it, the amount of electricity it's going to need," she said. "At the moment it's green fields with sheep and cows in it. It's going to be a monstrosity on the environment." Scotland's largest existing data centre is thought to be DataVita's site in Airdrie, North Lanarkshire, with a capacity of 12 megawatts. A planned centre at Chapelcross, in Dumfries and Galloway, would have a capacity of 1,000 megawatts if it goes ahead, which would make it one of the largest in the world.
The Scottish Greens and campaign groups have called for a moratorium on large data centres, arguing they could undermine climate targets and put pressure on renewable supplies. Smith previously told the BBC some of the discourse was "wild" and that 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." Friends of the Earth campaigner Kim Pratt said the proposals would "make a lot of profit for big tech companies" while imposing "national-level impacts" on energy bills and the climate, and that the government was taking only a few months to weigh effects that are still poorly understood.
A Scottish government spokesperson said new planning guidance would be published before the end of the year, that planning authorities must now notify ministers of new data-centre applications, and that an environmental impact assessment is required for all new centres with a power capacity above 50 megawatts. The verified news is a large demonstration and a forthcoming guidance document, not a decision to approve or block Chapelcross or any other single site.