‘People are frightened’: The tiny Scottish village fighting plans for one of Europe’s largest data centres

T he village of Auchtertool in rural Fife, 40km north of Edinburgh, has a population of 600 but no restaurants or shops. Its community pub opens only once a month, and even then it is ‘bring your own bottle’. Its village hotel has been turned into a care home. “It is really just the care home, primary school, village hall and six bus stops,” said local resident Jonathan Leitch. Auchtertool also has a water buffalo farm. Yet if developers get their way, the village may also soon have a “hyperscale” 600MW data centre , one of the biggest in Europe, comparable in size to almost anything in the US.

It would use the same amount of power as the entire city of Edinburgh, twice over. The £5 billion (€6 billion) proposal by Scottish developers ILI Group is meant to meet the growing, voracious data demands of artificial intelligence . The facility is slated for a farmland site on the edge of the village and would be bigger than the entire footprint of Auchtertool itself, with several large buildings up to 35m high, stuffed full of humming computer servers.

The village of Auchtertool, where £5 billion data centre project is planned. Local opponents liken its scale to stacking double decker buses in rows eight or nine high in local fields. The data centre, known as Cato, would also be built on top of the ruins of 1,000-year-old Hallyards Castle. “A lot of people in the village feel really anxious,” said Andrea Cail, chair of the local community council and an opponent of the plan. “They are quite frightened.

The scale is just overwhelming.” Andrea Cail, chair of the local Auchtertool community council in Fife, who is opposed to the data centre development. Photograph: Mark Paul Auchtertool has become a lightning rod example of Scotland’s growing community-led backlash against large-scale data centre development to fuel AI. There are more than 25 hyperscale projects in various stages of planning across the country. The Scottish government initially encouraged data centre development to soak up some of its vast amount of unused renewable energy capacity, which is often wasted due to poor grid connections.

But local communities across Scotland are co-ordinating to fight back, and are pressuring politicians to call a halt to development. “Scotland has capacity for 14GW of renewable energy, but only 4GW is actually used,” said John Underhill, a professor at University of Aberdeen and an expert on green energy development. He is the university’s director for energy transition. “The government originally saw the advantages of data centres, an attractive option to use up this spare electricity.

But they are now finding out that it isn’t going to be as easy as they thought. Communities are starting to react to the size of these things.” An artist's impression of the planned data centre. Image: Graeme Nicholls Architects Underhill said the debate is a “tug of war” between locals, developer and officials: “Auchtertool is just a wee place in Fife, with the prospect of a data centre similar in size to the village itself. You have to take communities with you, not do things to them.”

ILI, which wants to build Cato along with two more hyperscale data centres across Scotland’s central belt, told The Irish Times that it is aware that local communities are “increasingly sharing information” in co-ordinated action. “But we recognise that the concerns being raised in Auchtertool are important to local residents in their own right, and our responsibility is to listen and respond constructively,” said the Hamilton company.

Locals, who allege they have received different answers from ILI to the same questions, still have their doubts. Planning for the Cato centre has been delayed by new Scottish government requirements for environmental assessments of big projects. The villagers of Auchertool first encountered ILI in the spring of 2025, when it mooted its proposals. The village is in the countryside off the A92, but it is “not as rural as everybody thinks,” said Leitch, a former banker who now runs an Airbnb log cabin tourism business opposite the proposed data centre.

Local tourism business owner Jonathan Leitch, a former banker, who is part of the campaign group opposing the plan Locals are used to industrial activity. While Auchtertool is surrounded by fields, it already has a slew of industrial plants dotted around. There is a power-storing battery farm, two wind farms and substation nearby, and two industrial plants four miles away at Mossmorran, one for liquefied gas and another for ethylene, used to make plastic.

Cail and Leitch noted that locals were affected when the energy plant used to “flare” or burn off excess liquid. “You could see the glare in the night sky all the way from Edinburgh. It used to look like a bomb had gone off,” said Cail, who is originally from Yorkshire but is now a long-term Scottish resident and retired. She moved to Auchertool nine years ago. When planning permission was granted in recent years for a 170-acre solar farm near the village, Cail said locals had “had enough, they had done their bit”.

Then ILI arrived with its idea for Cato. Cail said the company insisted “they were different”, but that details were initially sparse and people didn’t understand what was planned. ILI hosted a 2025 consultation in the village hall and held meetings with the community council. Plans for the "hyperscale" data centre, beside the village of Aughtertool An artist's impression of the planned data centre. Image: Graeme Nicholls Architects Local opposition didn’t begin to mount until earlier this year, when the data centre debate took off across Scotland as a whole, as campaign groups such as Action to Preserve Rural Scotland began to co-ordinate with various affected communities.

Members of Auchtertool’s five-strong community council attended one co-ordinated meeting, where they realised that the Cato proposal was, at that time, one of the biggest planned anywhere in the world. “That lit the fire,” said Cail. ILI submitted its application earlier this year to Fife Council for planning permission in principle – locals had believed they would see more details before the application went in. The proposed height of the buildings had risen sharply from what locals say they were initially told.

They were also worried about the use of possibly hundreds of backup generators, as well as the data centre’s heavy water usage. Auchtertool has always had water shortages, Leitch said: “There isn’t even any water for the kirk (church). Parishioners use a Portaloo outside.” Relations soon deteriorated between the company and locals, who set up a dedicated campaign group in opposition to the plan. The town was galvanised as hundreds of people came to a public meeting in the village hall, many from elsewhere in Scotland.

“The room was incensed,” said Cail. Campaigners held protests at the Scottish parliament and outside the council. The fact that the proposed Cato centre was bigger than the village and that it would also flatten the ruins of a 1,000-year-old historic Scottish castle helped to attract media attention. Opposition to the data centre has galvanised the community. Photograph: Mark Paul Locals pulled together. They plastered the village in banners, printing T-shirts and posters.

About 15,000 objections were emailed to the council, overwhelming officials. Data centres are widely known for driving up local air temperatures. One ILI executive went on radio, where he appeared to suggest that increased heat could help people to grow tomatoes. Amused locals made “Say no to Cato Data Centre” badges plastered on a picture of a tomato. A relative of a local landowner who did a land deal with ILI for the site worked, locals said, as a road safety lollipop attendant at the school.

Pupils were soon singing songs against the data centre. The Scottish government, stung by widespread criticism, intervened to order automatic environmental assessments for all data centres over 50MW. This bought time for Auchertool. There is an effective temporary pause in all new big data centre development while new planning guidelines, due this year, are written. Campaigners want a full moratorium. The Scottish government is wary that such a move could spark legal action from developers.

ILI says it still intends to press ahead with its plans, although some locals, such as Leitch, believe they will eventually block the project. The uniting of Auchtertool in opposition to the data centre has had another, rather ironic spin-off effect. Leitch and Cail said it has improved the village’s sense of community, as locals, previously a mix of blow-ins and long-term residents battle together against ILI. “I know far more people in the village now than I ever did before,” said Leitch, who was born elsewhere in Scotland.

He said Auchertool won’t give up the fight. “The advice we got was to disrupt, disrupt, disrupt. We’re going to keep kicking the can down the road. Data centres are a speculative gold rush. We will stop this.”