Adrian Begbie, chief executive of Scottish Enterprise, has called on Scottish Government ministers to take an active role in deciding where data centres are built across Scotland, rather than leaving those decisions entirely to private developers chasing the cheapest land and fastest grid connection. The intervention, reported by the Daily Business Group, signals that Scotland's main economic development agency views AI infrastructure not as a commercial real estate question, but as a strategic national asset that demands political direction.
The timing matters. Data centre investment across the UK is accelerating sharply. According to JLL's 2025 Data Centre Investment Report, the UK attracted over £5 billion in data centre development commitments in the previous twelve months, with most of that concentration sitting in and around London. Scotland has surplus renewable energy, cooler ambient temperatures that reduce cooling costs significantly, and land available at a fraction of the price of the Home Counties. It is, on paper, the ideal location for the next generation of AI compute infrastructure. But infrastructure does not find its way to ideal locations by accident. It follows planning permission, grid capacity agreements, and political will.
What Begbie is articulating is a co-ordination problem that market forces alone will not solve. Left to developers, data centres cluster where the path of least resistance is shortest. That tends to mean sites near existing infrastructure, which in practice means Central Belt business parks rather than the Highlands, Aberdeenshire, or Fife coastal communities where the energy supply and the need for economic stimulus both exist. Ministerial oversight, in this reading, is not interference in the market. It is the mechanism that makes the market work for Scotland rather than merely in Scotland.
The waste heat argument is central to why location decisions carry such weight. AI server farms run hot, and that heat is currently vented into the atmosphere as waste at enormous scale. District heating networks, agricultural greenhouses, aquaculture operations, and municipal swimming pools can all absorb that heat and distribute it as free or near-free energy to homes and businesses. The Scottish Government's own Heat in Buildings Strategy identifies district heating as critical to Scotland's net-zero pathway. The University of Edinburgh's research into urban heat networks has shown that co-location of compute infrastructure with community heating systems is technically and economically viable. But none of that happens unless the data centre is in the right place to begin with, close to housing, close to farms, close to the communities that need cheap heat. A data centre on a business park outside Edinburgh serves shareholders. A data centre sited deliberately beside a housing estate in Dundee or a fish farm in Caithness serves Scotland.
The Westminster dimension is not incidental here. UK energy policy, grid connection queues, and planning frameworks all sit outside Holyrood's direct control, and traditional energy suppliers have a commercial interest in ensuring that free waste heat from AI infrastructure does not displace their revenue from domestic heating contracts. Scottish ministers taking a proactive stance on data centre locations is also, implicitly, a statement that Scotland will not wait for a UK-wide policy framework that may never arrive, or that may arrive shaped by lobbying from interests that would prefer the status quo. Begbie's call is a practical one, but it has a sharper edge: Scotland should decide, because if it does not, someone else will, and they will decide differently.
For Scottish SMEs, the implications run deeper than geography. Where major AI infrastructure lands shapes where the talent clusters, where the supply chain opportunities emerge, and which local economies get the productivity boost that comes from cheap, reliable compute and energy. Scottish Enterprise's position here is essentially an argument that economic development policy and digital infrastructure policy are the same conversation. Business owners across Scotland should be paying close attention to how ministers respond, and asking their local councils, regional growth boards, and MSPs where they stand on it.