The £8.2bn Lanarkshire AI site was sold as renewable. Its own documents say it will go on the grid.

The UK and Scottish governments sold an £8.2bn AI datacentre in Lanarkshire as Britain's first all-renewable AI site, with up to a gigawatt of new on-site generation. Documents the Guardian obtained under freedom-of-information requests show the promise was privately qualified before it was publicly made.

A gigawatt is roughly the output of a large nuclear reactor. It is also the load the Lanarkshire project would need to draw from the wider electricity network, on the Guardian's document trail, because no grid connection, no working wind project, and no confirmed backup plan exist at the site.

In January 2026, the UK and Scottish governments, alongside US cloud provider CoreWeave and Scottish operator DataVita, announced the Lanarkshire complex as a flagship UK AI Growth Zone. The plan bundled up to a gigawatt of "new energy infrastructure" with a promise that the site would run "entirely from renewable sources by 2030." Within months, internal correspondence on the FoI file tells a different story.

Officials at the National Energy System Operator (NESO) and within government acknowledged a "power provision" issue at the site, and an NESO freedom-of-information response, as the Guardian reports, shows no grid connection for the Lanarkshire project. A letter from First Minister John Swinney to DataVita managing director Danny Quinn sits on the same document trail, in the sequence of communications where the gap between the public line and private planning is most visible.

Parallel reporting by the Herald Scotland corroborates the FoI trail. Independent land analysis from APRS, a Scottish planning consultancy, describes the renewables plan as having moved "from no plans to Britain's largest onshore windfarm," a phrasing that concedes there was no concrete wind project on the day the renewable promise was announced. The 1GW target also exceeds the capacity of any operating onshore windfarm in the UK, and putting that much generation behind a single datacentre inside four years is itself a planning question separate from whether it can be in place on time.

DataVita and its property arm HfD Group have defended the project on their own channels and through the North Lanarkshire Energy Park page; a UK government spokesperson is also on the record defending the announcement. The documents do make one point the developers do not contest: internal discussion of a fossil-fuel alternative as a way to meet the 1GW demand. The conservative reading is that it was an option under active review, not a settled plan, because characterising it as a chosen fallback would require documents the Guardian has not published.

A UK engineering consultancy analyst quoted by the Guardian questioned the project's viability. UCL academic Cecilia Rikap, also quoted, questioned the public case for the project. Both critiques land because the public line and the planning line are out of phase.

Compute and capital were the binding constraints on AI infrastructure through 2024. Energy and grid capacity have replaced them, and the UK is now soliciting naming rights for a second wave of AI Growth Zones. The rubric the Lanarkshire documents make available is concrete: when the next AI infrastructure project promises renewable power, ask what grid connection exists today, what generation has been permitted, and whether the developer has signed a connection date.

The Scottish government and CoreWeave did not respond to a request for comment before publication.