Internal government correspondence obtained by The Guardian through Freedom of Information requests shows that UK officials and the developers of the Lanarkshire AI datacentre complex privately knew they faced a critical obstacle with power supply — even though they publicly stated the facility would run on renewable energy generated on-site. The investigation, published 6 July 2026, reveals a mismatch between what was promised and what the project could actually deliver at Scotland's first AI Growth Zone.

The venture was launched in January 2026 as a collaboration between US-based GPU cloud provider CoreWeave and DataVita, a subsidiary of a Glasgow property company. Government announcements promised over 3,400 high-value jobs, a community fund up to £543m, 1GW of new on-site renewable generation, and completion by 2030. North Lanarkshire Council was more bullish, projecting up to 7,000 jobs including indirect employment across the supply chain, and branding the site as potentially "one of the world's most advanced AI sites."

The Power Problem

The 1GW target was optimistic from the outset. Standard engineering calculations suggest that delivering this output from solar or wind farms adjacent to the site would require roughly 44 square kilometres of land. As of July 2026, DataVita controlled less than a tenth of that area — a gap the developers did not publicly acknowledge when the project was announced.

When The Guardian pressed the government on the findings, the official story shifted. A spokesperson conceded the complex would draw power from the national electricity grid rather than rely primarily on local generation, while claiming the grid power would still be "overwhelmingly" renewable. This is fundamentally different from the original pledge, and it collides with a major bottleneck: new connections to the UK's electricity grid currently have an eight-to-ten-year waiting list, affecting hospitals, housing schemes, and datacentres alike. The UK also has the highest industrial electricity costs in Europe, a financial drag on any grid-dependent plan.

DataVita's own blog described the CoreWeave partnership in September 2025 as delivering AI infrastructure "powered by renewable energy" within a £1.5bn investment commitment, and CoreWeave's investor relations page framed it as creating "the most advanced data centre, backed by renewable energy." The leaked documents suggest government and developers both understood by January 2026, when the Growth Zone designation was made, that on-site renewables were not feasible.

Coordination Problems on the Ground

The reality in the local communities tells a messy story. In late 2025, representatives from Oakes Energy Services went door-to-door through Newarthill, a village east of Glasgow, inviting residents to private conversations about solar farm development. They proposed incentives — free solar panels, tree planting, or cash — but resident Diane Davidson observed that none of these offers were documented or legally binding. The Guardian found no clear link between Oakes Energy Services and DataVita, casting doubt on whether these separate efforts were coordinated.

A planning application for a separate solar farm near the growth zone was lodged by Locogen on behalf of a larger international energy corporation — yet another strand disconnected from what was presented as a unified project. Work was already in progress beside DataVita's existing Chapel Hall datacentre when the investigation took place.

This case fits into a broader pattern The Guardian first documented in March 2026: that several prominent UK datacentre projects amount to "phantom investments," with government doing little to verify jobs claims or test the numbers. Cecilia Rikap, associate professor at University College London, told the paper that governments worldwide, including the UK, are "making political promises that ignore the realities of building infrastructure" for AI. An analyst at a UK engineering firm who worked on several Growth Zone projects was blunter: there "doesn't seem to be appropriate scrutiny" on these nationally significant schemes.

Lanarkshire is not unique. The Scottish Parliament Information Centre released a spotlight briefing on datacentres in June 2026, while the BBC reported community pushback to datacentre proposals in Auchtertool, Fife, the same month. A May 2026 Guardian investigation uncovered that a Scottish government incentive designed to attract datacentres could allow substantial carbon emissions to go unmonitored.

The core tension is structural. The UK's AI strategy is slamming into two immovable constraints at once: the grid connection backlog and the sheer land area needed for genuine on-site renewable power. Pledging both a 2030 opening and 1GW of self-generated clean electricity — without having secured the land or a grid connection slot — creates a promise that cannot be kept as originally framed. The pivot to grid power now confirmed by government puts the project into the same queue already backing up the wider energy transition. Yet the public-facing case for the Growth Zone designation was never updated to reflect this shift.

The deeper issue here is one of accountability. When a project of national significance is announced with specific environmental and jobs targets, those targets acquire a kind of political weight that makes them hard to walk back without public explanation. The silent revision from on-site renewables to grid power is pragmatic engineering, but it bypasses the democratic conversation that ought to accompany such a material change. Residents of Newarthill and the surrounding communities were invited to benefit or adapt to a certain vision of the development; that vision, it now emerges, was built on assumptions the developers themselves did not believe.