The Scottish engineer behind a bid to invest more than £16.5bn in a neglected part of rural Scotland has spoken exclusively to The Business about the hurdles to be overcome and assurances to be delivered so that the audacious vision can become reality.
Graeme Anderson, the CEO of CX Tech Limited, wants to build a major AI data centre complex on the site of Chapelcross nuclear power station. Known as CX Technology Campus, planning permission in principle was recently lodged with Dumfries and Galloway Council – just days after the Scottish Parliament debated a moratorium on data centres in Scotland.
The campus will comprise eight data centre buildings, plus a training centre to ensure the creation of a highly-skilled workforce for the south-west of Scotland.
However, it has met with opposition locally and nationally – including Outlander actor Sam Heughan – since the plans were submitted. Groups including Friends of the Earth Scotland, Action to Protect Rural Scotland, Stop Climate Chaos Scotland, Global Justice Now are stepping up the pressure on Holyrood with a demonstration next month in Edinburgh against hyperscale centres.
Anderson, 65, who is originally from Annan, believes that the area is desperate for well-paid jobs and an economic uplift – as highlighted by CX Tech Ltd being entrusted by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority to bring industry to a site earmarked for development by both Dumfries and Galloway Council and South of Scotland Enterprise.
He said: “There are parts of Annan where most folk are pensioners who worked many years for the nuclear industry. The depopulation of this area will only continue unless we create viable well-paid jobs for young people, just as the nuclear industry did in the 1960s until the turn of the millennium.”
LOCAL CONSULTATION HAS BEEN ‘POSITIVE’
CX Tech Ltd has already embarked on a consultation programme with local people around Annan, including the village of Creca nearest to the nuclear power station. He claims the response has, on the whole, been positive when people learn about the opportunities for the area.
“It is not something we haven’t tried before – I’ve been building significant data centres in the UK since 2004 – it’s just that we’ve not done it at this scale.”
What makes the CX Technology Campus project viable is the 160-mile radius rule for technology latency, which is the time dictated for a transaction or command to be transmitted over the fast fibre networks via servers.
“When I first started building computer centre for the finance industry, latency was dictated by the manufacturer of the micro switches. A lot of the work I was doing was for banks in Canary Wharf and there were traders and insurance companies dealing with regulation. The demand was for super-fast transaction speed.”
“The furthest distance away we could build a data centre was Slough. The distance now is 160 miles, which is the maximum.”
This is a crucial figure because many data centres act as satellites to the ‘mother ship’. They are all connected and are backed up in clusters or four or five smaller centres.
“The central ones are all in Dublin and Chapelcross is within the 160 miles of Dublin, whereas other developments proposed in Scotland are outwith this. As are other large data centres for the north-east of England. This makes a critical difference.”
He says every major US tech company, enticed by soft loans, easy planning approvals and pockets of land, all helped make the Republic one of Europe’s successful technology nations.
“I later worked in Ireland, living in Cork, designing major pharmaceutical plants with highly technical specifications for drug production. In 2018, the Irish Government recognised that they could repeat this with AI tech companies with the right incentives, such as discounted power and easy planning. Google and Microsoft hubs are anchor tenants in Ireland who have now attracted the likes of Equinix.”
Chapelcross retains an iconic place in the UK’s atomic energy story as the first commercial Magnox nuclear power stations in Britain opened in 1959. It is currently being rundown with only a skeleton staff on the large site.
The site has already been set aside by Dumfries and Galloway Council as an industrial development zone and Anderson believes his project, supported by international private equity funds, will pull in major international technology companies, using a renewables energy system which will deploy local wind farms and the biomass facility at Lockerbie to provide the massive power required for next generation data centres.
Protesters counter that argument by claiming that the new breed of hyperscale data centres employ few people, use massive amounts of energy and water for cooling and are owned by tech billionaires who are not accountable to the public.
Anderson does not agree with the ‘billionaire’ claim. Born in Annan, he began his career as an apprentice working for Rolls-Royce becoming an engineering problem solver. He has gone on to create his own engineering design consultancy. He sees the Chapelcross project as the culmination of all of his knowledge and wants it to be a legacy for Annan, the place he loves.
So far, he says they have already spent five years and £20m on the planning in principle to deliver the development for approval by Dumfries and Galloway planning committee.
He has a road map for power up to 2035, which will deliver 1,000MW of renewable power.
“If this comes back with approval from the planning committee in January next year, we will submit the detailed design for the first building, which is potentially between 50MW and 80MW of IT processing and load.”
He says it is vital to move rapidly to ensure that the data centre secures anchor tech company tenants, although he says several are keen to sign up if and when planning goes through.
A NEED TO CATCH THE DEMAND
“We would need to break ground in June next year and have that 50MW to 80MW processing load available for processing by December 2028, and that includes a new electricity substation,” he said.
Anderson pointed out that CX Tech Limited planned to build a private wire electricity network, matching energy demand without using the national grid.
“Our plan is not to put any extra strain on the national energy grid,” he said, adding: “I don’t like the word biggest. I don’t want to be the biggest of anything. However, a private network from multiple sources of renewable power has not been done before.”
He admits this is an engineering challenge which will enhance the viability of more wind farms in the south-west of Scotland. However, there are local campaigns in Galloway against the establishment of any more onshore turbines around the Solway Firth region.
“We’ve spent 18 months on design to prove our energy system works and can deliver the energy that we need. We know it works. We’ve stress tested this model and we’ve invested heavily in it.”
One stumbling block is the waiting time for electricity transformers and switchgear, which were once made in Scotland, and in Annan, but will now be coming from Turkey or Asia.
“Nvidia chips are not the constraint: they’ve already being ordered and bought. It is the transformers and switch gear that we will need. We will be working in tandem with Scottish Power Energy Networks to help bring on the energy supply.”
His plan requires a six-mile grid connection from Chapelcross to the major 440KVA line which runs through Glasgow to Carlisle and south. This will allow them to sell extra power to the national grid.
“I don’t want to end up in a curtailment position [when energy operators already producing electricity are being paid even although there is no connection to the grid]. So we will have to wait for the proper connections,” he said.
COMPLAINTS ABOUT NOISE LEVELS
Anderson is acutely aware that protesters have also raised complaints about noise, and the decibel level caused by the banks of fans in chiller cabinets cooling the heating systems. But he adds that CX Tech Limited carried out a “robust” environment impact assessment (EIA), which has so far not been done for any other planned AI data centres in Scotland.
“Carrying out a robust EIA and doing it properly is important to me, so our EIA is currently 500 pages long,” he explains.
One of the key issues that the EIA addresses is noise from CX Technology Campus, which must be below 10 decibels. “Chapelcross was previously a nuclear power station, which by their nature are not quiet, they make a noise. Now, in Britain, the rules from working in a factory is you can’t go above 65 decibels. That’s a fact of life.
“We put 20 receptors around Chapelcross to gather the data and noise. The planners said the rules are you can only go plus 10 decibels above background. Which meant my limit is now below 10 decibels.”
He said reaching a below 10 decibel target took a lot of work. Initially Anderson’s consultants said the best level they could achieve on build was 22 decibels. But increasing the height of the buildings only brought it down to about 14 decibels.
Anderson continued: “The heights went up from 32 metres to 40 metres because they’ve got acoustic screening everywhere. But I said it’s still not low enough.
“So then we had to look at where the manufacturers on the chillers and the farms, what happens if we put smaller chiller units and with fewer fans, how do we get down to below 10? And we eventually did that, but we’ve had to reduce the building loads.
“That’s a big compromise, because it gives me less processing power. But it’s the only way I can meet the noise on it, and that’s what we’ve done.
“Our power consultants and data centre advisers worked on the design, including generator noise and chiller noise, so that we could carry out the noise surveys and model the results.”
Despite all the work carried out so far, Anderson remains acutely aware that many people across Scotland – including some locally – still need convincing that this is really what the nation or Dumfries and Galloway needs. He simply asks that they look at the factual data.