As Managing Director of DataVita, I get very frustrated about a troubling narrative taking hold across Scotland: "Data centres don't bring jobs, so why do we need them?"
Here's the uncomfortable truth: many of the people making decisions about AI infrastructure in Scotland simply don't understand what's at stake. This isn't meant as a criticism, how can we expect them to keep pace when many within the industry itself are failing to grasp the scale of transformation ahead?
The path we collectively choose today will define our country for decades. This responsibility does not sit with the Scottish Government alone. It demands united and urgent action from every area of our public sector, from our industry leaders, and critically, from our electricity grid operators like SPEN and SSE. We face a stark choice between two futures: one of decline and one of generational prosperity.
The problem is that whilst they deliberate, the window of opportunity is closing.
So rather than get lost in technical arguments, I thought it would be more useful to paint two very different pictures of Scotland's future; one where we fail to embrace the AI movement, and one where we seize this generational opportunity. The path we choose today will define Scotland for decades to come.
The Future We Must Avoid: Scotland Left Behind
Picture this: Scotland in 2035, having rejected AI infrastructure investment.
Exporting Power, Importing Poverty
Our renewables sector, once a source of pride, continues to suffer from over-provisioning. We pay massive curtailment fees to wind farms whilst their energy flows south through interconnect cables to power data centres in England and beyond. We've become mere generators for other regions' prosperity.
We're passive consumers of technology developed and monetised elsewhere, using AI tools built by companies with no connection to Scotland, extracting value from our economy whilst contributing nothing back.
By 2035, data from Scottish citizens and businesses will be processed in English or European data centres. Every query to an AI tool, healthcare analytics, education platforms, public-sector systems flows through someone else's infrastructure, paying their taxes, sustaining their jobs.
The Brain Drain Becomes a Hemorrhage
Without major AI infrastructure, the new waves of AI-related jobs in Scotland jobs this revolution creates simply don't materialise here. Our top talent; engineers, data scientists, researchers relocate to London, Amsterdam, Dublin, anywhere the AI economy is booming.
The Hollowing Out of the Middle Class
Youth unemployment becomes particularly acute. The cruel irony? Many jobs AI threatens first are graduate and entry-level positions, followed by traditional white-collar roles. Edinburgh's financial services district is decimated as AI comes for the finance and legal sector, admin roles, paralegals, underwriters, and data analysts are all gone. The call centres that stretch across the central belt are lost to highly automated and interactive AI agents. These roles, the backbone of our middle class, become commoditised, and all that value erodes away from Scotland.
The Fiscal Spiral
As unemployment rockets and tax receipts fall, Scotland's large public sector becomes unsustainable. The NHS, education, and social services face devastating cuts. This triggers another wave of job losses, further eroding the tax base. Frontline services suffer, longer hospital waiting times, larger class sizes, reduced social care. The very fabric of public provision that defines Scotland begins to unravel, creating a vicious cycle of decline.
Green With Envy
We look on with envy at our neighbours like Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. Countries with similar populations and resources that embraced AI infrastructure when it mattered. They're thriving whilst we're left behind. (Ireland, despite their advantages, seems determined to join us in going backwards, actively rejecting the data centre investments that could secure their future.)
Our rich heritage of innovation, from James Watt to Alexander Graham Bell, becomes nothing more than a fond historical footnote.
The Future We Can Build: Scotland Reinvented
Now imagine this: Scotland in 2035, having fully embraced AI infrastructure.
The Green Gold Rush: Renewable Energy Fuelling AI Growth
Our decades of investment in renewables finally pays off spectacularly. Renewable energy becomes the essential ingredient for AI infrastructure, and Scotland has it in abundance. If we get this right, our renewables industry powered by AI could dwarf oil and gas at its peak.
The New Industrial Revolution
The construction boom is immediate and sustained. Hundreds of thousands of jobs emerge across supply chains nationwide as we build the data centres of the future. These aren't abstract "tech jobs"; they're concrete, tangible opportunities.
But construction is just the beginning. AI data centres directly employ thousands in extremely well-paid roles - data centre managers, AI infrastructure specialists, systems architects. The energy sector becomes enormous, creating vast numbers of jobs in renewable generation, grid management, and power distribution. Telecoms infrastructure explodes to meet connectivity demands. The massive supply chains required to support these facilities from cooling systems to security to catering—generate employment across every corner of Scotland.
The next wave creates highly skilled, well-paid positions: electrical and mechanical engineers, renewable energy specialists, technicians managing high-power infrastructure. Understanding critical infrastructure becomes the must-have skill of the generation.
Crucially, Scotland starts to develop technology rather than simply import it. Homegrown solutions emerge from the ecosystem surrounding our data centres, software, hardware, and services designed in Scotland, for Scotland, and exported to the world.
The Gravity of Giants
Some of the world's biggest companies pour hundreds of billions of pounds into Scotland. With them comes natural gravity—innovation clusters, start-ups, venture capital. When organisations locate their infrastructure somewhere, that place becomes their first port of call for investment.
The world notices. Google and DeepMind open R&D hubs in Glasgow. Universities in Tokyo and Toronto partner with Scottish AI clusters. Investors refer to "the Scottish Model" sustainable, sovereign, and socially grounded. The country becomes small in geography, vast in influence.
There are multiple flights per day between Scotland and California.
By 2035, delegations from governments worldwide visit Scotland to understand how they achieved "responsible AI infrastructure deployment." Scotland's model of combining renewable energy, AI development, community benefit, and environmental protection becomes the United Nations' recommended framework.
Exporting Talent No More
Our education system reinvents itself, producing graduates with the exact skills the AI economy demands. Instead of brain drain, we're actively recruiting the world's brightest minds to Scotland. We create generations of innovators who don't just use this technology. They define how it will be used.
The Scottish AI Fund
Scotland establishes an AI Infrastructure Fund, mirroring Norway's energy model. The world's largest countries and tech companies pay into this fund for access to Scotland's renewable-powered AI infrastructure. The returns are staggering—billions per year flowing into public coffers, creating consistent budget surpluses.
Child poverty becomes a thing of the past. Food banks close their doors permanently. The fund finances world-class healthcare, education, and social programmes whilst still growing. Scotland proves that the AI revolution, done right, can eliminate poverty whilst building prosperity.
The Choice Is Ours
These aren't distant possibilities. The decisions we make in the next few years will determine which future becomes reality.
The misunderstanding that "data centres don't create jobs" ignores the entire AI infrastructure ecosystem they generate: construction, engineering, maintenance, innovation, research, and the countless indirect opportunities that follow major infrastructure investment.
Scotland stands at a crossroads. We can watch this industrial revolution happen elsewhere, or we can be at its centre. We can export our renewable energy to power other regions' AI ambitions, or we can use it to power our own.
The infrastructure is coming. The only question is: will it be here, or will we be left behind?
What future do you want for Scotland?
Related insight:
Discover how DataVita, in partnership with CoreWeave, is bringing this vision to life through a £1.5bn investment in renewable-powered AI infrastructure.