The £2bn Scotland project shows consent is the new constraint

In the Lammermuir Hills of the Scottish Borders, where the loudest sound is typically wind, the next fight over data center capacity has already begun: a developer is proposing three buildings up to 24 meters tall as part of a £2 billion ($2.7 billion) project, still in pre-application and not yet formally in the permitting process, but already carrying a 10,000-signature petition and organized local opposition.

That sequence is now the opening chapter for hyperscale developments, according to Neel Khokhani, founder and CEO of Epochal Corporation, writing in Data Center Dynamics. Khokhani argues that data centers cannot afford to treat communities as an afterthought, and the examples travel well beyond Scotland: outside Melbourne, local communities objected to expansion of a hyperscale campus over prolonged construction noise and plans to add backup diesel generators, and in Inzai, near Tokyo, residents have sued the private inspection company that approved a 52-meter data center next door, seeking to nullify the building permit.

The engineering around data centers is becoming more routine; the trust problem is not. Siting is a political campaign issue now, not merely a permitting one, and the Lammermuir petition operates the same way: organized opposition, a public rallying point, and a target that has not even submitted its formal application.

AI is driving the need for compute capacity, and analysts expect global demand for data center capacity to rise sharply through the remainder of the decade, with AI workloads as the engine, while governments increasingly treat digital infrastructure as a strategic asset rather than just another real estate class. Meeting that demand means building at a scale Khokhani says the industry has never attempted.

The pitch to communities is not empty: large developments bring construction jobs, long-term capital, supply-chain work, and skilled technical jobs that last after construction ends, and regions that have seen industrial decline can use that investment. But the benefits do not erase what residents see from their windows. The qualities that make a site attractive—open land, available power, quiet—are the same qualities a community values about home, and hyperscale construction runs for years, the noise carries, the landscape changes, and the finished facility consumes significant electricity and, depending on design, substantial water.

In Khokhani's telling, those concerns surface again and again once a proposal becomes public, and the repetition is the point. The Melbourne objection was about construction noise and diesel generators—enumerable, addressable items; the Inzai lawsuit was about a building permit and an inspection company's approval, a legal mechanism rather than a slogan; the Lammermuir petition is a reaction to 24-meter heights. None of this is vague; it is a list of design inputs.

The industry can model noise, adjust generator plans, redesign facades, and shift construction schedules, but the harder problem is time: opposition organizes during pre-application, before a developer has secured the certainty it wants, and the delay that follows gets folded into the cost of capital while the timeline stretches. Khokhani's warning is that the delay is often more difficult to overcome than the engineering, and Melbourne and Inzai bear that out.

Developers that internalize the lesson will change their sequencing, because community engagement needs to begin before the petition, not in response to it, and the engagement needs specifics: noise studies, water-use estimates, diesel generator counts, construction phasing. The alternative is to treat the petition as a public relations problem and discover that the pre-application phase was the cheapest moment to address it.

The trust gap now joins the power constraint as the two bottlenecks that will decide which data centers get built. PWD's tracking has long held that the grid is the new land; consent is becoming the new environmental review. The Lammermuir project is a test of whether a developer can move from proposal to approval when the community has already organized, and the 10,000 signatures are on file before the application exists. The developer's response will tell the rest of the industry what the next decade of siting looks like.