AINEWS
The first UK 'AI growth zone' financing layers a £202M National Wealth Fund guarantee over a £252.5M bank loan to DataVita, with CoreWeave pre leasing every new megawatt for 15 years.
A £202M UK government guarantee sits behind most of the £252.5M bank loan that Scottish data-centre operator DataVita closed on 18 August 2026 to expand its Lanarkshire site, and every megawatt of new capacity is already pre-leased to US AI-cloud provider CoreWeave under a 15-year contract.
That stack, sovereign guarantee first, bank debt second, an American offtake locked in at the back, is the first public working diagram of how the UK government intends to translate its "Delivering AI Growth Zones" policy paper (CP 1440, November 2025) into actual compute. The £300M headline number, announced by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), is the sum of those layers, not a single grant. (Roughly $380M at typical 2026 GBP/USD rates; approximation.)
GOV.UK describes the package as a £300M "investment" landing in Lanarkshire, an "AI Growth Zone", a UK government designation that prioritises a region for AI compute investment and grid upgrades. The breakdown, corroborated by trade publication digit.fyi, reads as a senior debt facility of £252.5M, syndicated by ING, ABN AMRO and Santander, with ING as adviser and coordinator and Santander as agent. A £202M guarantee from the UK National Wealth Fund covers 80% of that bank tranche, so the state absorbs most of the lenders' credit risk. A smaller, uncovered portion comes from the Scottish National Investment Bank and Siemens Financial Services. An equity layer inside DataVita itself, undisclosed in size, sits beneath the debt. The money flows to DataVita to expand the existing DV1 facility and build a new DV3 data centre in North Lanarkshire.
The Lanarkshire zone is also notable for what is not on the open market. CoreWeave, the New Jersey AI-cloud provider that has become a default infrastructure supplier for US AI labs, has signed a 15-year lease covering the full capacity of both the expanded DV1 and the new DV3, according to the DSIT press release. That structure does two things at once. It gives the lenders a credit story: CoreWeave, not DataVita, is the tenant of record, and the 15-year tenor roughly matches the loan's amortisation profile. It also gives the government a "jobs and investment" headline: DSIT says the zone is expected to support more than 3,400 jobs and to attract follow-on investment, with Dell Technologies locating a Scottish team at the adjacent Lanarkshire AI Innovation Park.
If CoreWeave's pipeline contracts, because US AI labs slow capex, or because CoreWeave itself runs into refinancing trouble, the Lanarkshire zone's debt service is the first place that pressure shows up. Not DataVita's balance sheet, and not the public ledger.
Lanarkshire is one of several UK AI Growth Zones established under CP 1440, the November 2025 DSIT paper that lays out how the UK will designate regions, fund grid upgrades, and steer planning for AI compute. Calling the deal "Scottish" is geographic, not jurisdictional. The policy, the guarantee, and the lead department are UK-wide, and the bank syndicate is European.
That distinction matters for what readers should expect next. The same financing template, sovereign guarantee, multi-bank debt, single anchor tenant, is now visible to any other UK region bidding to host a zone, and to the lenders being asked to underwrite them. The "AI growth zone" label is now a public balance-sheet construct, not a slogan.
Several pieces of the picture are still missing. DSIT and DataVita have not disclosed the equity cheque, the specific grid-asset spend inside the £300M, or the contracted power capacity at DV1 and DV3. The November 2025 policy paper and the press release both describe the zone as "expected" to support 3,400 jobs. That is a forecast, not a count, and the figure sits in the public communications rather than in a delivery contract. The GOV.UK announcement calls the package an "investment"; the digit.fyi write-up calls it a debt facility. The difference is who carries the loss if the zone underperforms.
The deal also predates any published critique of the AI Growth Zone programme on cost, delivery timing, or energy mix. Readers watching the second zone award, or the next financing close, will get the first real test of whether this Lanarkshire template can be repeated at the same risk profile. The open question is whether the public guarantee was the load-bearing piece all along.