DataVita has raised a debt facility of about £300m to expand and build two data centres in the North Lanarkshire AI Growth Zone, underwritten by a £202m guarantee from the National Wealth Fund. Every megawatt of capacity is contracted to CoreWeave on a 15-year lease.
The Scottish operator is funding the expansion entirely with debt, leaving its equity untouched — a deliberate contrast with the equity-heavy financing most UK AI infrastructure has relied on so far.
The syndicate is broad. ING acted as adviser and coordinator, with ABN AMRO and Santander — the latter serving as agent — alongside the Scottish National Investment Bank and Siemens Financial Services through Siemens Bank.
The National Wealth Fund's £202m guarantee sits against the £252.5m tranche provided by ING, ABN AMRO and Santander, covering 80% of that lending. The balance from SNIB and Siemens Financial Services is uncovered, meaning those two lenders carry full credit risk on their portion.
This is the National Wealth Fund's first backing of domestic compute capacity, and it is structured as a guarantee rather than a direct equity stake — the state takes credit exposure without taking a shareholding.
The money will expand DataVita's existing DV1 facility and build a new site, DV3. Both are contracted to CoreWeave, the AI cloud provider that supplies infrastructure to several leading model developers, under a 15-year lease. That contracted revenue is what makes the debt bankable at this scale.
Construction is expected to create around 600 jobs, with roughly 100 permanent high-skilled roles once the sites are running. The first facility is due to complete this year.
DataVita is Scotland's largest independent data centre developer and operator, with more than a decade of operating history. Its customer base includes central government, local authorities and universities running workloads on sovereign UK infrastructure.
Its North Lanarkshire site received Scotland's first AI Growth Zone designation earlier this year. DV1 and DV3 are intended as the first phase of a larger campus, positioning the area as a UK hub for AI compute and feeding into the government's Compute Roadmap and Scotland's five-year AI strategy.
Danny Quinn, managing director at DataVita, said the project was being delivered rather than announced: work is advanced on site, every megawatt is contracted and the first facility completes this year.
UK AI minister Kanishka Narayan said the countries that build the infrastructure behind the technology will be the ones that attract investment and create jobs. The government estimates AI could be worth up to £47bn a year to the UK economy over the next decade.
For a sector where most large UK announcements have been headline capital commitments rather than drawn facilities, a fully contracted, bank-syndicated £300m with a sovereign guarantee behind it is a different kind of proof point.
Original source: DIGIT
