DataVita secures £300m for data-centre roll-out

Data-centre specialist, DataVita has secured a debt facility of around £300m, to expand and build two data centres in the North Lanarkshire AI Growth Zone, following a £202m financial guarantee from the National Wealth Fund. The facility has been raised with participation from a syndicate of five lenders.

The investment will expand DataVita’s existing DV1 data centre and fund the construction of a new data centre, DV3. The capacity of both is contracted to AI-cloud firm CoreWeave, under a 15-year lease agreement.

The financing will enable the delivery of Scotland’s first AI data centres within a designated AI Growth Zone, strengthening sovereign AI capability and driving growth in the wider Glasgow City region.

The development of DV1 and DV3 will act as the first step in a larger, planned data centre campus in the area, helping to establish North Lanarkshire as a key location for AI infrastructure in the UK. The two developments financed by this facility will create around 600 jobs during construction as well as around 100 permanent high-skilled jobs once completed.

DataVita has been part of Scotland’s digital infrastructure for more than 10 years and is the country’s largest independent data-centre developer and operator. The company delivers AI infrastructure end to end, using low-carbon electricity, data centres, sovereign cloud and connectivity through to the AI platforms its customers run. Its customers include central government, local authorities and universities, which rely on DataVita to keep critical national workloads on sovereign UK infrastructure.

Earlier this year, DataVita’s North Lanarkshire site was awarded Scotland’s first AI Growth Zone designation, recognising the company’s role in building the next generation of UK AI infrastructure.

Danny Quinn, managing director at DataVita, said: “There is plenty of talk about AI infrastructure just now. This project is being delivered: work is well advanced on site, every megawatt is contracted, and the first facility completes this year.

“DataVita delivers AI infrastructure end to end, from the energy that powers it through to the applications that run on it. We have been doing this in Scotland for more than 10 years. The UK needs its own AI capability, built here and run here, and we are grateful to the National Wealth Fund and our lenders for backing a project that is already delivering it.”

He added: “This type of investment in Scotland’s data-centre infrastructure would have been unthinkable just two or three years ago. That is the impact AI is having. Scotland has all the right ingredients to take advantage of the AI revolution and make it a core part of its economy.”

www.datavita.co.uk