Plans for a data centre worth £16.5 billion were submitted this week for the site of the former Chapelcross nuclear power plant in Dumfries and Galloway, in the south of Scotland. Sky News and the BBC both reported the submission, which comes from a developer called CX Tech Ltd and describes a 1GW facility near Annan, among the largest computing campuses proposed anywhere. If approved, the developers claim the scheme could deliver more than a decade of construction activity and around 500 full-time jobs at the operating site.
The site choice is not accidental and the pitch leans on it. Chapelcross, Scotland’s first nuclear power station, generated electricity from 1956 until its closure in 2002, and the grounds retain grid connections and an industrial identity that a computing developer can convert into an argument. CX Tech says the centre would run on green energy and has a planned lifespan of at least 30 years, according to Scottish Construction Now. The pitch also reaches past the compute itself: local supply chains, rates income for the council, and a use for an estate that has sat partly idle since decommissioning.
The opposition is already organised and its language matches the scale. The Scottish Greens, who oppose the project, have pointed out that a 1GW draw, roughly the output of a large power station, would strain Scotland’s grid and its climate budget, and claim the facility would be the biggest data centre in the world, as Yahoo News summarised their position. The arithmetic behind their objection is the energy question: a single campus demanding a gigawatt needs generation, transmission and consent, all of which are the binding constraints on British infrastructure now, not capital.
This lands in the middle of a national argument about data centre buildouts. The same week, UK tech leaders called for a £20 billion sovereign AI push that names data centre capacity as the bottleneck, and a record construction pipeline of AI-driven facilities has already been logged across the country. Developers pitch these campuses as economic conversion: stranded industrial land plus grid proximity plus the AI demand curve. Opponents pitch them as energy sinks with few permanent jobs, a handful of hundred posts against a gigawatt of demand, in a countryside that hosts the pylons.
Planning now passes to Dumfries and Galloway Council with the scale of the scheme almost guaranteeing Scottish Government interest, and energy policy means the National Grid connection queue will matter as much as any councillor’s view. A decision this side of the spring is unlikely; a precedent-setting fight over whether Britain’s grid can spare a gigawatt for compute is very likely. Chapelcross spent half a century making electricity for the national grid. Its next act, if CX Tech has its way, is consuming a sizeable slice of it for someone else’s cloud.
