Scotland’s Data Centre Map and Tracker: every data centre proposal mapped

Sites

OperatingUnder constructionApplication lodgedRefused / appealPre-applicationAnnouncedGrid queue onlyStalled

Circle area scales with MW. Hollow rings have no published capacity. Positions are approximate (town or estate level).

How sizes are banded

There is no single industry standard: sources put "hyperscale" anywhere from 10 MW to over 100 MW. This tracker uses five bands by IT or grid capacity, with Scotland's 50 MW planning threshold as the line between medium and large. DC BLOX · RISE · Scottish Government

Band	Capacity	Proposed	Operating	What it means
Small	under 5 MW	0	7	Server rooms, edge sites and small colocation halls. Most of Scotland's operating data centres.
Medium	5 to 49 MW	0	1	Large colocation or enterprise sites, such as DataVita DV1 (24 MW). Below Scotland's 50 MW threshold.
Large	50 to 249 MW	9	0	Hyperscale scale. At 50 MW and above, councils must notify Ministers and an EIA is mandatory.
Very large	250 to 999 MW	15	0	Multi-building hyperscale or AI campuses.
Gigawatt	1,000 MW and above	2	0	Gigawatt-scale AI campuses, each a quarter of Scotland's winter peak demand or more.
Size unknown	not published	5	8	No capacity figure published yet.

For scale: Scotland's winter peak electricity demand is about 4,000 MW. The Register

What a megawatt means in homes

Data centres run day and night all year. 1 MW used at full capacity for a year is 8,760 MWh. Scottish homes used 8.8 TWh of electricity in 2024 across 2.57 million households, about 3,420 kWh per home. So each megawatt at full capacity is roughly the electricity of 2,560 homes. Scotland's total electricity use in 2024 was 21.7 TWh.

Sites rarely run at full capacity all the time, so pages show a range. The low end assumes three-quarters of capacity on average. That is what the two Scottish developers' figures we have imply: Auchtertool's energy statement gives 4,000 GWh a year for 600 MW (76%), and Chapelcross is estimated at 7 TWh a year for 1,000 MW (80%). Where a figure has been published for a site, its page uses that figure instead. Scottish Parliament (SPICe) Scottish Parliament

Capacity	Homes' worth of electricity	Share of Scotland's homes	Share of all Scottish electricity	Compared with every electric train in Britain
50 MW	96,000 – 130,000	4–5%	2%	8–11%
120 MW	230,000 – 310,000	9–12%	4–5%	19–26%
300 MW	580,000 – 770,000	22–30%	9–12%	48–64%
600 MW	1.15 million – 1.53 million	45–60%	18–24%	about the same
1,000 MW	1.92 million – 2.56 million	75–100%	30–40%	1.6–2.1 times

Other ways to picture it

Electricity user	Per year
Every home in Scotland (2024)	8.8 TWh
Every business, factory and public building in Scotland (2024)	12.9 TWh
Every electric train in Great Britain, passenger and freight (2024-25)	4.1 TWh
All of Scotland (2024)	21.7 TWh

For balance: Scotland generated 51.8 TWh in 2024, more than twice the 21.7 TWh it used, and in 2025 about 8.8 TWh of wind in northern Scotland was switched off because the grid could not carry it. Developers argue data centres could use power that is now wasted. Whether a site would depends on where it connects: most switched-off wind is in the north, most proposals are in the Central Belt, and data centres need power on calm days too. Scottish Government The Energyst (Montel analysis)

So a 600 MW campus would use about as much electricity as every electric train in Britain. Office of Rail and Road · Scottish Government

Two things can push real use above these figures: some published capacities cover only the computers, with cooling on top, and campuses may grow beyond their first phase. Large sites are also built in phases, so use will be lower in the early years. Homes here means average household electricity, not heating, which in most Scottish homes is gas. The Scottish Parliament's researchers used Ofgem's "typical household" figure of 2,500 kWh, which gives higher home counts; we use Scotland's actual average. Scottish Government · National Records of Scotland

Proposed, in progress and stalled

31 schemes · 10,267 MW

Schemes from first announcement through to a lodged application, plus those under construction, refused or stalled. Most are large AI campuses still at pre-application, and together they would add many times today's operating capacity.

Operating

16 sites · 36.4 MW known

Data centres running in Scotland today, mostly colocation, bank and research sites in the Central Belt, Aberdeen and Dundee. Most are small; the largest, DataVita DV1 at Chapelhall, is about 24MW.