Thousands March in Edinburgh Demanding Consultation on Scotland's 23 Data Centre Plans

More than 80 organisations backed the march, including climate groups, trade unions, local campaigns and anti-poverty charities. Friends of the Earth Scotland, which promoted the event, counts 23 data centre proposals at various stages of planning. By its calculation they would add 9.1GW to Scotland's current peak electricity demand of about 5GW, and could make data centres the country's most polluting sector by 2030.

That scale is why opponents say the decisions cannot be left to individual planning applications. "These developments are so massive they're going to have national-level impacts," Kim Pratt, a campaigner at Friends of the Earth Scotland, told the BBC. Campaigners want what they call a "national conversation" before ministers allow any of the schemes to proceed.

The schemes vary widely in size. The largest, at Chapelcross in Dumfries and Galloway, would have 1,000MW of capacity if approved, which the BBC said would make it one of the largest data centres in the world. Scotland's biggest operating site today, DataVita's facility in Airdrie, North Lanarkshire, runs at 12MW. Residents opposing proposals at Larbert in Falkirk and Cockenzie in East Lothian joined the march. A Larbert campaigner said 7,124 direct objections had been lodged against the application there, according to The National.

"It's going to be a monstrosity on the environment," Kim Cairns of the campaign against the Chapelcross plan said, according to the BBC.

The government has defended the sector. Alyn Smith, the innovation minister, has called data centres "the whisky bonds of the AI sector", the BBC reported, and argued that comparisons with a badly run facility in the Utah desert do not reflect what Scotland will get. The Scottish Greens have called for a moratorium on large data centres, saying they could undermine climate targets and put more pressure on renewable energy supplies.

Organisers presented the Edinburgh march as part of a wider European campaign against data centres, after protests earlier in November in Denmark, the Netherlands, Spain and Ireland. They timed it to coincide with a global day of action around the COP31 climate talks in Antalya, Turkey.

Ministers have not agreed to the consultation campaigners want. A government spokesperson said ministers would publish new planning guidance on data centres "before the end of the year" and were "developing a strategic approach to maximising the public benefit from data centres located in Scotland". Planning authorities must now notify ministers of new data centre applications. A new planning direction also requires an environmental impact assessment for any new data centre above 50MW.