This column appears as part of the Winds of Change newsletter.

When campaigners against data centres gathered at the Scottish Parliament a couple of weeks ago, one of the things they frequently mentioned was the scale and speed of the arrival in Scotland of these developments. Sometimes, they described it as “the Wild West”. The applications, it felt to them, were coming, fully formed, out of nowhere.

The speed of this data rush is, indeed, extraordinary. A few years ago they were barely on anyone's radar, and now there are 24 hyperscale data centres either proposed or in the planning system in Scotland.

It’s so fast there have now been multiple calls for a moratorium, and signs in the past week that the SNP are set to back a temporary ban.

It’s so fast that forecasts of its energy demand have doubled in just three years. In 2022, the national grid operator, National Grid ESO, thought data centre energy demand would grow to 13-35 TWh/year by 2050, but by November 2025, NESO Future Energy Scenarios report was predicting a 2050 demand “ranging from 30-71 TWh.

Meanwhile, the UK Government has set a target of 6 GW of AI-ready data centres in the UK by 2030.

Data centres are the landscape-level manifestation of how the tidal wave of AI is transforming countless aspects of our lives, from the way we work to how we communicate to how we relate and onto the technology and energy infrastructure we build.

On so many levels this shift is about how we cope with speed, and whether some processes need to slow down.

There are even parallels between what is happening in our brains at the technology interface and what’s happening on the land. I recently learned that one of the reasons that it feels like AI thinks too fast for me to keep up is because my brain is working at just 500 bits per second, and AI processes at trillions of bits per second.

On the ground, data centres to deliver this processing power look set to be built at........

© Herald Scotland