Scotland AI Data Centers Could Eat 51 Percent of Carbon Budget

(MENAFN) Scotland’s planned AI data center boom could become the country’s largest single source of pollution by 2030, swallowing more than half of its remaining carbon budget, environmental campaigners warned.

Friends of the Earth Scotland released emissions estimates covering 23 proposed data center projects now moving through planning processes in Scottish councils. If every project wins approval, the group calculated, they would release 14 million tonnes of greenhouse gases a year by 2030. Over their operating lifetime, that adds up to 208 million tonnes, or 51% of the country’s remaining carbon budget.

The Scottish government has set a total carbon budget of 406 million tonnes through 2045, the year it has pledged to reach net-zero emissions.

The campaign group also projected that Scotland’s current data center capacity, roughly 50 megawatts (MW), could swell 182-fold to 9,100 MW if all proposed facilities are built.

“Data centres risk torpedoing Scotland’s climate plans. If ministers approved all these projects, every other sector of Scottish life would have to cut its climate pollution further and faster,” Kim Pratt, a senior campaigner at the organization, told a Scottish newspaper.

“We can’t allow our remaining climate budget to be wasted on AI slop instead of vital services, food production and things people genuinely need,” she added.

Kat Jones, director of Action to Protect Rural Scotland, cautioned that building every hyperscale data center in the grid queue could triple the country’s peak energy demand.

“If every hyperscale data centre in the grid queue was to be built it would triple Scotland’s peak energy demand, we would see new records set for air pollution, and the process of decarbonising our economy would be set back by decades,” she said.

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