Scotland's Ravenscraig proposed for £4bn hyperscale data centre

The 160 acre, 550MW project is the brainchild of Apatura, a Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) developer with offices in York and Edinburgh. Ravenscraig is one of five sites the company is looking to progress across Scotland’s central belt, where over 1.6GW of new grid connections have already been confirmed. Apatura claims that BESS combined with Scotland’s excess wind energy – set for huge expansion over the next decade – will allow these data centres to operate with a comparatively low carbon footprint.

Once one of Europe’s biggest hot strip steel mills, Ravenscraig ceased operations in 1992. Now the 1200-acre plot, which sits about 20km east of Glasgow in North Lanarkshire, is one of the UK’s biggest brownfield development projects. 

Apatura claims its £3.9bn investment plan for Ravenscraig could add 0.4 per cent to Scotland’s GDP, with much of the benefit retained in North Lanarkshire. The proposal, which has been put forward as a candidate for the UK government’s AI Growth Zone initiative, is predicted to create around 2,000 long term jobs, with several thousand more through the construction phase.