Summary
- A £202m National Wealth Fund guarantee has helped unlock approximately £300m of financing for DataVita.
- The funding covers expansion of DV1 and construction of DV3, with both facilities contracted to CoreWeave for 15 years.
- The deal converts part of Scotland's AI Growth Zone programme from announced ambition into financed data centre capacity.
DataVita has secured approximately £300m of debt financing to expand its DV1 facility and build the new DV3 data centre in North Lanarkshire, backed by a £202m guarantee from the UK National Wealth Fund.
The financing has been provided by a lender group including ING, ABN AMRO, Santander, the Scottish National Investment Bank, and Siemens Financial Services through Siemens Bank. The National Wealth Fund guarantee covers 80% of £252.5m provided by ING, ABN AMRO, and Santander.
Both facilities are contracted to AI cloud infrastructure provider CoreWeave under a 15-year agreement, giving the financing package a long-term customer commitment behind the physical expansion.
The National Wealth Fund said the transaction is its first support for domestic compute capacity. Around 600 construction jobs are expected across the two developments, followed by approximately 100 permanent roles when the capacity is operational.
Financing is an important dividing line in the UK’s rapidly expanding pipeline of AI infrastructure announcements. Large data centre schemes routinely reach the market with headline investment figures, but construction depends on bankable customers, land, planning, equipment procurement, and a credible power route.
The DataVita transaction puts committed debt behind two defined assets. DV1 is an existing facility in Lanarkshire, while DV3 is the new build forming part of the larger campus planned within Scotland’s first designated AI Growth Zone.
The financing also illustrates the growing role of public credit support in digital infrastructure. A government guarantee does not remove project risk, but it can shift the risk profile faced by commercial lenders and make a large debt package possible on terms that would otherwise be difficult for emerging compute infrastructure.
That is particularly relevant to AI data centres, where investment has to be committed before a facility begins earning from installed compute. Electrical equipment, cooling plant, building shells, network connections, and specialist construction consume capital well ahead of full operation.
DataVita says work is already advanced and that the first facility covered by the programme is due to complete this year. The long-term CoreWeave contract gives lenders greater visibility over future utilisation than a speculative campus built ahead of customer demand.
The power position remains central to the wider North Lanarkshire expansion. DataCentral has previously examined the gap between the scale of the Lanarkshire AI Growth Zone’s ambitions and the electricity infrastructure required to deliver them. The broader programme has been associated with hundreds of megawatts of data centre capacity and substantial new energy infrastructure.
The £300m financing does not by itself resolve those wider grid and generation questions. It does, however, establish funded capacity within the programme, supported by contracted demand and a defined group of lenders.
DataVita says DV1 and DV3 will use Scotland’s low-carbon electricity mix and closed-loop cooling designed to reduce water consumption. Those operating claims will become more testable as the assets enter service and actual power, cooling, and water performance can be measured.
The next distinction will therefore be between the financed first phase and the much larger AI Growth Zone vision around it. Debt, customer contracts, construction progress, and commissioned megawatts provide a harder measure of delivery than the multibillion-pound investment figures attached to the eventual campus.
