CX Tech has formally submitted plans for a £16.5 billion ($21.77bn), 1GW data center and technology campus at Chapelcross, near Annan in the South of Scotland.

The company lodged an application for Planning Permission in Principle (PPiP) with Dumfries & Galloway Council this week for the CX Technology Campus. The application covers eight buildings totaling 162,000 sqm (1.74m sq ft) plus an on-site substation.

If planning permission is secured this year, construction could run from 2027 to 2035, according to a dedicated project website. The buildout would span eight years on a 55-hectare site.

Cooling, power, and heat reuse

The campus design calls for closed-loop, non-evaporative air cooling to reduce water use. Backup generation will run on green fuel rather than conventional diesel.

CX Tech is exploring direct and private-wire connections to wind, solar, and biomass generation and claims the site will run "exclusively" on renewable energy. The company is also exploring potential waste heat reuse opportunities.

The site benefits from an adjacent 132kV Grid Supply Point and is surrounded by "substantial existing and potential renewable energy," according to CX Tech, making it suitable for data center development.

Graeme Anderson, chief executive of CX Tech Limited, said: "Global demand for AI and high-performance computing is accelerating rapidly, but delivering the next generation of digital infrastructure is about much more than simply building additional data center capacity. The challenge is bringing together scale, power, sustainability, resilience and the ability to grow over the long term."

Anderson, who founded project management services firm GA Consultants in 2022, added: "Chapelcross gives us the opportunity to create that platform. We are proposing approximately 1GW of potential capacity on a major brownfield energy site, delivered in phases and designed from the outset around renewable power, highly efficient operation and exceptionally low water consumption. We are not designing this around a single operator or a single point in the market cycle. Our ambition is to create an infrastructure platform capable of evolving with the requirements of AI, cloud and high-performance computing, giving major operators the opportunity to deploy and expand at significant scale."

A nuclear legacy site

The land carries a long industrial history. Used as an RAF and munitions base during WWII under the name RAF Annan, the site later hosted the Chapelcross nuclear power station. That plant launched in 1959, totaled 240MW of capacity, and was decommissioned in 2004. Removal and remediation work of buildings is ongoing. The data center campus is proposed on land north of where the nuclear plant stood.

CX Tech Limited, previously named CX Power, launched late last year. The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority's wholly owned subsidiary, NDA Properties Limited, has appointed the company strategic development partner for the site. CX Tech held community meetings to discuss its plans in June.

The NDA group announced in 2024 that it was working with CX Power to develop a green energy hub at Chapelcross, with the potential to develop AI data centers as part of the project.

Political resistance

The proposal faces opposition. South Scotland MSP Laura Moodie of the Scottish Greens called for the bid to be rejected.

She told Holyrood: "The site at Chapelcross should be the best place to put a data center by utilizing a decommissioned brownfield site. But the proposal which has been lodged is reckless and endangers our energy supply and natural environment."

A Facebook group against the project, Say No to Chapelcross AI Data Centre, counted just under 700 members at the time of writing.

Despite ample renewable power, Scotland has traditionally had a very small data center market. That has changed quickly. In recent years, developers have proposed gigawatts of new capacity across more than a dozen projects.

The growth has drawn pushback from local residents, opposition groups, and officials, particularly the Scottish Green Party. After the Greens put forward a motion, the Scottish Parliament recently backed a de facto but temporary moratorium on hyperscale data centers, vowing not to approve any new schemes until new planning guidelines are finalized.