DataVita has submitted a planning application to North Lanarkshire Council for DV4, a new data centre at Chapelhall.
The site forms part of the Lanarkshire AI Growth Zone. DV4 is the next stage of a campus DataVita has operated for more than ten years. The company runs DV1 at Chapelhall, Scotland’s largest purpose-built Tier III certified data centre. It is also constructing DV3 next door and operates its second facility in Glasgow.
DataVita is a supplier of cloud services to the Scottish public sector through the Scottish Government’s Cloud and Hosting Services framework.
The submission for planning permission in principle is supported by a suite of technical assessments, covering energy and decarbonisation, noise, air quality, transport, flood risk and drainage, ecology and landscape, heritage, ground conditions, economic impact and construction environmental management.
DataVita has held four public consultation events, with feedback helping to shape the design of the development. The maximum building height has been reduced from 30 to 26 metres, operational plant has been placed to the south of the building away from homes, and around 1,000 metres of new native hedgerow will be planted – at least double the length being removed.
A feasibility study is underway for a community garden and greenhouse, warmed by surplus heat from the data centre, an idea raised by residents at the consultation events which would be funded through a community investment fund.
Danny Quinn, MD of DataVita, said, “We have seen a lot of data centre speculation in Scotland recently, and the vast majority of it will never be built. DataVita has been operating in Scotland for more than ten years, and we already underpin a lot of the critical services used day in, day out across Scotland. We built DV1 at Chapelhall, we are building DV3, and we run them ourselves with a Scottish team. DV4 is the next stage of that campus.
“Not all data centres are the same, and we are keen to change the public perception. Scotland has an opportunity not only to become a data centre location but an exporter of intelligence via low-carbon data centres. We don’t think of exporting barley when we talk about the success of our whisky industry, and data centres should be no different. The application is now with the council and open for comment, and I would encourage people to look at the detail.”
DV4 is designed to meet the four criteria the Scottish Government recommends for green data centres. It will run on 100% renewable electricity backed by certificated Scottish generation. Its efficiency target is a power usage effectiveness below 1.25, ahead of the recognised European benchmark for cool climates.
Cooling for the facility is closed loop and sealed, with no evaporative cooling, and a water usage target of 0.05 litres per kilowatt hour or lower. Heat recovery is built in from day one, and DataVita is in discussions with the new Monklands Replacement Hospital and the neighbouring BioCity campus on the reuse of surplus heat.
DataVita revealed it has also gone ‘well beyond’ what an application at this stage requires on air quality. The assessment models deliberately extreme scenarios, including every standby generator across DV1, DV3 and DV4 running at the same time and a continuous 72-hour emergency, conditions that have never arisen. In more than ten years of operation, the Chapelhall campus has not experienced a single grid power cut, and DV1’s standby generators have been needed for a total of one hour of unplanned running in that decade, outside the routine tests operators carry out.
The development is said to represent £849.6 million of construction investment over two years, supporting 2,650 construction job years and 120 permanent skilled roles on site, with apprenticeships, and at least 40% of capital contracts expected to be delivered by local suppliers.
