Thursday December 11th 2025
Scottish Borders Council headquarters
Written by Local Democracy Reporter, Paul Kelly
Plans have revealed for a major new IT data centre on the Roxburghe Estate in Berwickshire.
Sunlaws Development Company Limited has submitted a request to Scottish Borders Council for an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) over its plans for Southside Data Centre on land at Clawbare Cottage in Longformacus, outside of Duns.
The proposed development site is located 9.4km to the south east of the Fallago Rig wind farm, a 48-turbine wind farm on Lammermuir Hills in Berwickshire.
A data centre is a dedicated facility housing IT infrastructure-servers, storage, and networking gear to store, process, and distribute vast amounts of data, forming the backbone for cloud computing, online services (streaming, banking, apps), and digital operations, ensuring critical data and applications are always accessible through robust power, cooling, and security systems.
Major new data centre bids and projects are rapidly expanding across the UK, driven by the government’s AI Opportunities Action Plan and significant private investment from hyper-scalers like Amazon, Microsoft, and Blackstone
The closest town to the proposed development, Duns, is approximately 11km away.
Other villages are closer to the development site, including Westruther and Longformacus which are approximately 5km and 2km from it.
The proposed development comprises of three large two-storey data centre buildings (up to a total ground footprint of 8.1ha), with associated infrastructure (grid connection, transformer, switchboard and Uninterruptible Power Supply system), staff/visitor parking, internal access roads and walkways, security fence and landscaping.
Each two-storey building will have a height up to 24m and an internal floor space of 54,000m2 over the two floors. Within each building, half comprises IT floor space and half comprises electrical and mechanical infrastructure.
A report with the application states: “The site would be supplied with a mains gas connection and a grid connection for electricity with connections secured through the relevant utility providers.
“The site will have multiple data connections supplied by relevant providers which will run underground to the site. Water supply is anticipated to come from a Scottish Water and a borehole, and will be subject to licence from SEPA.
“The proposed development includes an emergency power supply from back-up and balancing gas generation supplied from the gas network. This is only used in the event of an emergency power outage, and for generator testing.”
The primary objective of Environmental Impact Assessment is to identify the likely consequences for the biological and physical environment and for human health and welfare, arising from a proposed development and to consider these issues within the development planning and design process.
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