PLANS have been submitted for a huge 80,000-square-metre data centre at a site owned by billionaire businessmen James and Sandy Easdale
The proposal was submitted by Slate Island Developments Ltd and would be built in the Spango Valley to the south-west of Greenock.
The 28.21-hectare brownfield site was once occupied by the IBM computer factory and was acquired by the Easdales for £1.5m in 2018.
The development would form part of a wider project incorporating a separately proposed Battery Energy Storage System (BESS).
The National previously reported that the businessmen – who also own the bus firm McGill’s – had hoped to build up to 450 properties on the site but scrapped the plans earlier this year.
According to documents submitted to Inverclyde Council, the proposal includes four data centre buildings of “varying sizes” as well as other infrastructure including access roads and parking.
It also comes after “strong interest” from a data centre operator according to planning consultancy Pegasus Group, who are helping Slate Island Developments, of which Sandy Easdale is a director, with the application.
“Such a use is considered to be well suited to the site due to growing demand nationally for data centres, and the site’s large areas of previously formed development platform, which is ideally suited to a ‘large floorplate’ user,” the firm said.
A spokesman for Slate Island Developments, meanwhile, said: "Spango Valley has a proud history as a centre for technology and employment in Inverclyde, and these proposals offer an exciting opportunity to open a new chapter for this important site. "There is now strong interest from the data centre sector, providing a real opportunity to bring this long-vacant brownfield site back into productive use.
"Data centres are becoming an increasingly important part of the infrastructure underpinning our economy, supporting everything from everyday digital services to cloud computing and artificial intelligence."
Data centres have been treated as critical infrastructure since 2024, putting them on equal footing to water, energy and emergency services systems, making gaining planning permission easier.
There are 23 other sites across Scotland currently identified for development, and 20 of those are already in the planning system.
But campaigners have urged the Scottish Government to bring in a moratorium on all planned new data centres.
The First Minister John Swinney has so far resisted calls for a pause on new developments, despite a new requirement for environmental impact assessments to be carried out on two proposed new centres.
Public finance minister Hannah Mary Goodlad announced recently that these would be required for two proposed data centres in Auchtertool in Fife and Wester Hermiston in Edinburgh.
But campaigners against such sites want there to be an immediate moratorium, ahead of a requirement for environmental impact assessments to be carried out for all planned data centres.
They also insisted there should be an independent assessment of the need for hyperscale AI data centres in Scotland, looking at the impact these have on communities, land, water, the power grid and Scotland’s climate commitments.
