UK’s first sovereign data centre powered by renewable energy to be built in Scotland 

The UK's first sovereign artificial intelligence data centre powered by renewable energy will be built in Scotland.

The development, which will be jointly delivered by Argyll Data Development (Argyll) and SambaNova, will be based in the Killellan AI Growth Zone, a 184-acre facility on the Cowal peninsula.

“Together with SambaNova and our strategic partners, we’re building a sovereign AI infrastructure powered by renewable energy, demonstrating that sustainability and scale can go hand in hand,” said Peter Griffiths, executive chairman at Argyll. “Our goal isn’t just to make AI greener, but to make it competitive, compliant and cost-effective.” 

The data centre will use wind, solar and wave energy generated on site to power its GPUs, which will be used to run an AI inference cloud.  

AI inference is the process of “using” an AI model, like ChatGPT, to answer questions on a dataset that it hasn’t been trained on. This process is very energy intensive, with a study from Google showing that the per-prompt energy impact of using a chatbot is the equivalent of watching TV for around nine seconds. 

By basing the data centre in Scotland, the developers are aiming to create a “sovereign-scale AI” facility that will keep sensitive workloads within UK borders and drive “regional economic growth”. A sovereign data facility is designed to keep data within a specific country or jurisdiction, increasing security and keeping the data stored there in line with local laws and regulations. 

“This project gives UK enterprises the ability to innovate responsibly, securely and within our own borders, in full alignment with national AI ambitions,” said Griffiths. 

The UK Government recently announced a partnership with OpenAI that will allow businesses to store their OpenAI data on UK-based servers for the first time. The government hopes that this move will reduce concerns about data security and privacy, resulting in an uptick of AI usage across the economy. 

According to Argyll, the wider AI Growth Zone at Killellan could generate £15bn in total investment, create more than 2,000 construction jobs annually and contribute £734m each year to the Scottish economy.  

The data centre will be powered by SambaNova’s air-cooled GPU systems, which don’t rely on liquid cooling to operate. These systems draw roughly one-tenth of the energy needed to power a traditional rack of GPUs, potentially reducing the economic and environmental costs associated with AI usage. Waste heat from the centre will be used to support projects like vertical farming and aquaculture in the local area. 

Initially the site will provide 100 to 600 megawatts of capacity, with the potential to scale up to over two gigawatts of capacity. A private-wire renewable energy network and vanadium-flow battery storage, a type of rechargeable battery that stores excess energy in liquid electrolytes, will provide a closed-circuit energy system for the facility. 

“Argyll is a blueprint for scaling AI responsibly,” said Rodrigo Liang, CEO and co-founder of SambaNova. “By pairing renewable power with high-performance, energy-efficient computing, it shows what sustainable AI infrastructure can achieve.”