DataVita has secured a £300 million (US$407 million) debt facility to expand its data centre operations in North Lanarkshire, Scotland, within the country’s first designated AI Growth Zone. The financing has been unlocked by a £202 million (US$274 million) guarantee from the National Wealth Fund (NWF) and is being provided by a lending syndicate comprising ING, ABN AMRO, Santander, the Scottish National Investment Bank and Siemens Financial Services. The NWF guarantee covers 80% of a £252.5 million lending tranche provided by ING, ABN AMRO and Santander, while the remaining financing from the Scottish National Investment Bank and Siemens Financial Services is unsecured. 

The funding will support the expansion of DataVita’s existing DV1 data centre and the construction of a new DV3 facility in the North Lanarkshire AI Growth Zone. The entire capacity of both facilities has already been contracted to CoreWeave under a 15-year lease agreement, providing dedicated infrastructure for AI computing workloads. The two facilities will form the first stage of a larger planned data centre campus in the area and are intended to establish North Lanarkshire as an important UK location for AI infrastructure. 

The project also has strategic importance for the UK's AI ambitions. It represents the National Wealth Fund’s first support for domestic compute capacity and aligns with the UK Government’s Compute Roadmap and Scotland’s five-year AI strategy. The facilities will use Scotland’s low-carbon electricity mix and closed-loop cooling technology, which is intended to reduce their consumption of natural resources. The wider Lanarkshire AI Growth Zone is expected to attract more than £8 billion in private investment and create more than 3,400 jobs. The DataVita development is therefore positioned as an initial investment that could help establish a broader AI and digital infrastructure cluster in the region, while increasing the UK's domestic capacity to support AI workloads and reducing reliance on overseas compute infrastructure.