ENVIRONMENTALISTS are demanding the Scottish government urgently address the “major shortcomings” in its policy on data centres.

Action to Protect Rural Scotland (APRS) campaigners say that Scottish ministers have failed to include the emissions from hyperscale AI data centres in work looking at the impact of “green data centres” on climate change targets.

The Scottish government’s NPF4 national planning framework on green data centres states these will have “overall negligible impact” on achieving the country’s emissions reduction targets.

But APRS said an investigation it had carried out showed the government had failed to include hyperscale data centres, which tech firm IBM has said can house at least 5,000 servers and “quite possibly miles of connection equipment.”

The countryside charity noted that the government’s greenhouse gas assessment was published in October 2022 – before the launch of AI systems such as ChatGTP, which have sparked rising demand for data centres.

APRS is calling for a stay on new data centres amid these concerns

Director Kat Jones said: “It is pretty shocking to find out that the vast carbon footprint of hyperscale data centres has been completely excluded from the government’s greenhouse gas analysis.

“However, it is not surprising because, when our national planning framework was being written, Chat GPT had not launched and hyperscale AI data centres simply didn’t exist.

“The new Scottish government needs to urgently address the major shortcomings of their current policy on data centres.”

The Scottish government said: “Our aim is to secure commercial investment in data centres that help drive economic growth while aligning with Scotland’s net-zero ambitions and delivering benefits for communities.”