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Starmer pledges £200m for Grangemouth site from National Wealth Fund

UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has announced a further £200 million investment in the Grangemouth industrial site, where Scotland’s only oil refinery is expected to close later this year. Refinery owner Petroineos announced the closure of the facility last year amid plans to transition the site into a fuel import terminal, leading to the […]

UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has announced a further £200 million investment in the Grangemouth industrial site, where Scotland’s only oil refinery is expected to close later this year.

Refinery owner Petroineos announced the closure of the facility last year amid plans to transition the site into a fuel import terminal, leading to the loss of more than 400 jobs.

Sir Keir announced the funding, which will come from the newly created National Wealth Fund, at the Scottish Labour conference in Glasgow on Sunday.

Addressing the conference, Sir Keir said the Grangemouth site presented a “huge opportunity for renewal”, with potential for future uses in biofuels or hydrogen energy.

“We will grasp the opportunities at Grangemouth, work alongside partners to develop viable proposals, team up with business to get new industries off the ground,” he said.

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer delivers his keynote speech during the Labour Party Conference, at the ACC Liverpool. © Peter Byrne/PA Wire
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer delivers his keynote speech during the Labour Party Conference, at the ACC Liverpool in September 2024. Image: Peter Byrne/PA Wire

“And to attract private investors into the partnership we need, we will allocate £200m from the National Wealth Fund, for investment in Grangemouth, investment in Scotland’s industrial future.”

The Prime Minister said every worker made redundant at the site would get 18 months full pay, alongside a £10m skills and training programme.

Businesses that take on Grangemouth workers will also be in line for national insurance relief, Sir Keir said.

It comes after Scotland’s First Minister John Swinney separately announced £25m in extra funding for Grangemouth last week.

The UK and Scottish governments had previously committed £100m to the Falkirk and Grangemouth Growth Deal to support jobs and skills in the area along with a report – called Project Willow – to look at the future of the site.

Grangemouth future

Speaking to BBC Radio Scotland’s Good Morning Scotland programme on Monday, Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar said work must proceed “at pace” to attract investors.

Sarwar said the £200m funding is “not to be sniffed at”, and could lead to investment in areas such as hydrogen, synthetic fuels and sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) production.

“It’s £200m of National Wealth Fund money, which, as I say, is meant to attract multipliers in terms of investment from private sector money,” he said.

© Andrew Milligan/PA Wire
Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar. Image: Andrew Milligan/PA Wire

“But I think it all depends on the projects that come forward. And I think if we can make, as I say, one of the three examples I’ve mentioned, I think there’s four or five other things that project willow is looking at.

“All of them I think would secure a positive future for the site of Grangemouth. But what we require now is to move at pace and attract that investment.”

‘Huge investment opportunity’, Sarwar says

Sarwar said the Grangemouth site is a “huge investment opportunity” due to its strategic location, grid connections and existing port infrastructure.

But he criticised the “intransigence” from the site’s owner Petroineos, a joint venture between PetroChina and Ineos, when asked whether Labour could prevent job losses.

In response, Petroineos regional head of legal and external affairs Iain Hardie told the PA News Agency that the company warned politicians and officials “repeatedly” of the looming closure “for several years”.

“This included detailed briefings to Mr Sarwar and members of his team,” Hardie said.

“It will always be a matter of regret that neither Scottish nor UK governments were moved to action until last summer, but what did happen is that Petroineos conceived project willow, to identify opportunities for low-carbon manufacturing that could secure a bright future for Grangemouth.

“The financial commitments made by the current governments at Holyrood and Westminster this past week are hugely encouraging but that money can only be deployed to good effect if complemented by policy and regulatory interventions that will make these technologies investable.”

Government has ‘finally listened’, union says

Trade unions have criticised the site’s closure and accused both the Scottish and UK governments of not doing enough to ensure a just transition for workers.

But following the announcement, the Unite union said it welcomed the funding announcement for Grangemouth, although it cautioned the “devil will be in the detail”.

Unite general secretary Sharon Graham said: “This is welcome news after months of our campaign and supported by the community of Grangemouth, Keir Starmer and the UK government have finally listened. This needs to be the start not the end in delivering a real workers’ transition for Grangemouth.’

© Andrew Milligan/PA Wire
Unite General Secretary Sharon Graham speaks at a demonstration to protest at Petroineos plans to close Grangemouth oil refinery, during the Scottish Labour Party conference at the Scottish Exhibition Centre (SEC) in Glasgow. Image: Andrew Milligan/PA Wire

“Following this announcement, it is essential that all stakeholders come together to put the meat on the bones and that this investment counts for jobs and our security. Clear timescales will be important as well as details on jobs.”

Unite has previously outlined a plan to produce sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) and the union says the Grangemouth refinery is “essential to the success of the Scottish economy”.

SNP First Minister John Swinney also welcomed the funding announcement, calling it a “step in the right direction”.

“Everyone working at Grangemouth’s refinery is a valued employee with skills that are key to Scotland’s net zero future,” he said.

“We will continue to work constructively with the UK government to secure the site’s future.”

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European Commission Proposes 90 Pct Emissions Cut by 2040

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Arista Buys VeloCloud to reboot SD-WANs amid AI infrastructure shift

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Data center capacity continues to shift to hyperscalers

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Oracle inks $30 billion cloud deal, continuing its strong push into AI infrastructure.

He pointed out that, in addition to its continued growth, OCI has a remaining performance obligation (RPO) — total future revenue expected from contracts not yet reported as revenue — of $138 billion, a 41% increase, year over year. The company is benefiting from the immense demand for cloud computing largely driven by AI models. While traditionally an enterprise resource planning (ERP) company, Oracle launched OCI in 2016 and has been strategically investing in AI and data center infrastructure that can support gigawatts of capacity. Notably, it is a partner in the $500 billion SoftBank-backed Stargate project, along with OpenAI, Arm, Microsoft, and Nvidia, that will build out data center infrastructure in the US. Along with that, the company is reportedly spending about $40 billion on Nvidia chips for a massive new data center in Abilene, Texas, that will serve as Stargate’s first location in the country. Further, the company has signaled its plans to significantly increase its investment in Abu Dhabi to grow out its cloud and AI offerings in the UAE; has partnered with IBM to advance agentic AI; has launched more than 50 genAI use cases with Cohere; and is a key provider for ByteDance, which has said it plans to invest $20 billion in global cloud infrastructure this year, notably in Johor, Malaysia. Ellison’s plan: dominate the cloud world CTO and co-founder Larry Ellison announced in a recent earnings call Oracle’s intent to become No. 1 in cloud databases, cloud applications, and the construction and operation of cloud data centers. He said Oracle is uniquely positioned because it has so much enterprise data stored in its databases. He also highlighted the company’s flexible multi-cloud strategy and said that the latest version of its database, Oracle 23ai, is specifically tailored to the needs of AI workloads. Oracle

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Datacenter industry calls for investment after EU issues water consumption warning

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Data center costs surge up to 18% as enterprises face two-year capacity drought

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Microsoft will invest $80B in AI data centers in fiscal 2025

And Microsoft isn’t the only one that is ramping up its investments into AI-enabled data centers. Rival cloud service providers are all investing in either upgrading or opening new data centers to capture a larger chunk of business from developers and users of large language models (LLMs).  In a report published in October 2024, Bloomberg Intelligence estimated that demand for generative AI would push Microsoft, AWS, Google, Oracle, Meta, and Apple would between them devote $200 billion to capex in 2025, up from $110 billion in 2023. Microsoft is one of the biggest spenders, followed closely by Google and AWS, Bloomberg Intelligence said. Its estimate of Microsoft’s capital spending on AI, at $62.4 billion for calendar 2025, is lower than Smith’s claim that the company will invest $80 billion in the fiscal year to June 30, 2025. Both figures, though, are way higher than Microsoft’s 2020 capital expenditure of “just” $17.6 billion. The majority of the increased spending is tied to cloud services and the expansion of AI infrastructure needed to provide compute capacity for OpenAI workloads. Separately, last October Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said his company planned total capex spend of $75 billion in 2024 and even more in 2025, with much of it going to AWS, its cloud computing division.

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John Deere unveils more autonomous farm machines to address skill labor shortage

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2025 playbook for enterprise AI success, from agents to evals

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OpenAI’s red teaming innovations define new essentials for security leaders in the AI era

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