The Scottish government is about to consider a sweeping moratorium on building new datacentres, putting a key plank of the UK’s AI strategy at risk. Last Sunday the Scottish National party (SNP)’s national council passed a motion to freeze all new datacentres in Scotland. That motion has been sent to the Scottish government to consider.

It could apply to all datacentre projects that have not yet received planning permission – although its exact implementation is up to the Scottish government to decide. Lesley Backhouse, who attended the national council meeting, said that Scotland’s current datacentre plans amounted to “overdevelopment” and were “intrusive and not keeping with the local environment”. The move emerged as the Guardian on Monday revealed how the developer and the UK government misrepresented the technical feasibility of a massive datacentre hub in Scotland in the face of community fears that their land would be subsumed by the development, and promised jobs and investments would never materialise.

This site, in Lanarkshire, was to be an “AI growth zone”, a key element of the government’s strategy to build national AI infrastructure in rural areas of Britain. The SNP’s resolution came amid signs of a wider upheaval in the UK’s AI strategy as Andy Burnham prepares to replace Keir Starmer in Downing Street. He is reportedly considering a review of several critical planks of Starmer’s technology policy.

The Guardian previously reported that an “AI growth zone” in North Tyneside was more of a publicity stunt than a viable project, despite being supposedly backed by the maker of ChatGPT, OpenAI. Several other big UK AI projects have been found to be “phantom investments” after the government failed to audit investment numbers or jobs claims. “I don’t think anyone is arguing that we should not have any datacentres in the UK or Scotland,” said Graham Simpson, a member of the Scottish parliament representing North Lanarkshire.

“But there needs to be a proper piece of work at the government level to decide how many the country needs and what is our capacity for them, in terms of our resources.” A moratorium on datacentres in Scotland could strike at the heart of the UK’s wider AI strategy. British officials have pushed Scotland as the prime location for datacentres due to its access to plentiful renewable energy. The SNP’s resolution could halt projects such as the Lanarkshire AI growth zone.

The SNP resolution suggests that the number of massive datacentres planned in Scotland could overwhelm its renewables capacity. It says there are 24 “hyperscale” datacentre projects in various stages of planning in Scotland. Combined, they would use more than one-and-a-half times the power Scotland uses at peak demand.

“It is extreme overdevelopment. I’m very supportive of the local community and their endeavours to prevent this from happening,” said Backhouse. Meanwhile, the chair of the Commons science and technology select committee, Chi Onwurah, on Monday criticised the UK’s broader AI investment strategy, saying that without a proper plan for achieving sovereignty it has been “very opportunistic”.