DataVita files Chapelhall's third building after consent talks

While Scottish data center announcements run years ahead of construction, DataVita has submitted plans for DV4 on its Chapelhall campus in North Lanarkshire only after four public consultation events and a round of revisions that show what consent in Scotland now costs.

The revisions are the application's substance: the maximum height fell from 30 meters to 26, the operational plant moved to the building's south side away from homes, and the site would gain around 1,000 meters of native hedgerow, which DataVita says is double the length of foliage the development removes. The facility would use closed-loop cooling to minimize water usage, run on 100 percent renewable energy with a power usage effectiveness target of 1.25, and supply surplus heat for reuse discussions underway with Monklands Replacement Hospital and the neighboring BioCity campus. DataVita also attributes to residents the idea of a community garden and greenhouse warmed by waste heat, now under feasibility study and to be funded through a community investment fund.

DV4 would be the third building at Chapelhall. DataVita operates DV1 there, a building originally constructed by HFD Group and run by the company since 2016; it took ownership from a syndicate of private investors in a 2021 deal with £45 million of support from DataVita's owner. DV3 is under construction on the same campus, and DV2 sits in Glasgow.

The same operator raised £300 million in August, with a £202 million National Wealth Fund guarantee behind £252.5 million of senior debt on its CoreWeave-contracted Scottish campus, as this publication reported. The filing and the financing belong to the same strategy: present a plan to the community, then pay for the buildout.

Quinn is blunt about the contrast. “We have seen a lot of data center speculation in Scotland recently, and the vast majority of it will never be built,” he said, noting that DataVita has operated in the country for more than a decade and runs its own facilities with a Scottish team. DV4, in his words, is “the next stage of that campus.”

Consent, rather than capital, is now the binding constraint on the data center buildout. The DV4 planning file is evidence for that view: a four-meter height reduction, a plant moved away from homes, and hedgerow planting at twice the removed length are concessions a developer makes when the planning committee is the gate that matters.

The application is now with the council and open for comment, so the next DV4 milestone is a planning decision, not a financing announcement. DataVita's record — one building operating since 2016, one under construction, one sitting in the council's queue — is the concrete counterweight to the speculation its own managing director calls out.