Glasgow vehicle converter Allied Vehicles is in early talks with Glasgow City Council about building a data centre on former railway works land at Cowlairs, in the north of the city. Pre-application documents put the facility’s capacity anywhere between 20MW and 100MW, depending on the final building design.
What is proposed
The plans, first reported by local news site The Glasgow Bell on 29 October, concern roughly 11 acres of brownfield land off Carlisle Street, opposite Cowlairs Park. The site formed part of the Cowlairs Railway Works, which closed in 1968. Allied Vehicles has recently brought part of the land back into use as a vehicle refurbishment centre.
The project is at the pre-application stage and no formal planning application has been lodged. The council declined to discuss the proposal, saying pre-application discussions are confidential. No investment figure, customer, power supply arrangement or construction timetable has been made public.
Founded in 1993, Allied Vehicles builds adapted and special-purpose vehicles, including taxis, wheelchair-accessible cars and minibuses. A move into digital infrastructure would be a departure from its core business, and the company has not publicly set out how it would develop or operate the facility.
The numbers in context
Even at the lower end of its range, the scheme would be large by Scottish standards. Market tracker Baxtel lists 13 data centre sites in Glasgow and 47 across Scotland, with the largest operational facility, DataVita’s DV1 in North Lanarkshire, at 12MW. Existing Glasgow facilities include DataVita’s DV2 and iomart’s DC1.
The 20MW–100MW range also straddles an important regulatory line. On 16 September the Scottish Parliament backed a pause of up to a year on planning and consent decisions for hyperscale data centre applications while national guidance is prepared. The Scottish Government also requires a mandatory environmental impact assessment for new data centres above 50MW, and is due to report on its planning guidance by the end of 2026.
Why it matters for modular and edge in Europe
The Cowlairs proposal reflects a pattern seen across the UK: landowners with former industrial sites inside cities exploring data centres as an alternative use. Urban brownfield plots close to population centres and fibre routes are the kind of locations where regional colocation and edge capacity tend to be built, rather than the remote greenfield campuses favoured for the largest AI projects.
The wide capacity range is also notable. A design at the lower end would sit below Scotland’s 50MW threshold for mandatory environmental assessment, while the upper end would not. With Scottish planning rules for large facilities still being written, developers there have reason to consider phased schemes that can start small and expand. Factory-built power, cooling and white-space modules are commonly used for that kind of staged growth, although Allied Vehicles has not said what construction approach it would take.
Whether the Cowlairs scheme reaches a formal application, and at what size, will be an early test of how Glasgow handles data centre proposals under Scotland’s tighter regime.
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