Scotland imposes mandatory environmental assessments on new datacentres
Anti-datacentre protests at the Scottish parliament at Holyrood. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The GuardianView image in fullscreenAnti-datacentre protests at the Scottish parliament at Holyrood. Datacentres are critical for storing and processing data used by AI.
- ▪Anti-datacentre protests at the Scottish parliament at Holyrood.
- ▪Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The GuardianView image in fullscreenAnti-datacentre protests at the Scottish parliament at Holyrood.
- ▪Datacentres are critical for storing and processing data used by AI.
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| Original publisher | The Guardian — World |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/sep/16/datacentres-scotland-environmental-assessments-ai-boom |
| Publication time | Wed, 16 Sep 2026 11:55:33 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-16T12:13:41.429Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-16T12:13:41.429Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 8hWwaNLf9NXA · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Anti-datacentre protests at the Scottish parliament at Holyrood. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The GuardianView image in fullscreenAnti-datacentre protests at the Scottish parliament at Holyrood. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The GuardianDatacentres - UKScotland imposes mandatory environmental assessments on new datacentresGovernment announces before vote on moratorium that any projects above 50MW must submit assessments in planning processPatrick GreenfieldWed 16 Sep 2026 07.55 EDTLast modified on Wed 16 Sep 2026 07.56 EDTSharePrefer the Guardian on GoogleLarge-scale datacentres will face mandatory environmental assessments before they can go ahead, the Scottish government has announced, amid growing public concern about the impact of the AI boom.Ahead of a vote on a moratorium on new hyperscale…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Guardian — World.
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