The UK Government is using “hugely inflated jobs estimates” in order to justify the construction of hyperscale data centres, campaigners have claimed.

Countryside charity Action to Protect Rural Scotland (APRS) highlighted “preposterous” figures on the employment created by such developments.

It now wants to see “far more scrutiny of the claims” from both the Government and developers with regard to data centre jobs.

APRS issued the plea as it published a report on the issue, but the UK Government insisted the research “fundamentally misrepresents how jobs are counted for major infrastructure project”.

It comes weeks after UK Technology Secretary Liz Kendall visited Scotland’s first AI growth zone in Lanarkshire, claiming developments there could create 3,400 jobs in the coming years.

APRS said it is concerned the Government is not estimating jobs accurately – citing the case of the £10 billion AI growth zone announced for Northumberland in 2024.

The APRS report said while the Government had said the zone would support 4,000 jobs, “later clarification revealed that this total included 1,200 construction roles and 2,700 indirect and induced jobs, meaning the data centre itself would only directly employ 100 people”.

APRS also analysed data centre employment in northern Virginia in the US, which has the “largest accumulation of data centres in the world, constituting 13% of all reported data centre operational capacity globally”.

Here it found investment into data centres had totalled 71 billion US dollars (£53.4 billion) in the past decade, adding this “dwarfed investment in other sectors” such as manufacturing which had received 34 billion US dollars (£25.6 billion).

APRS – which is already calling for a moratorium on new hyperscale data centres in Scotland – said: “Data centre investment was extremely ineffective in creating jobs, creating only three jobs per 100 million US dollars invested.”