Or in a downturn when banks profits are up, is there just no appetite to develop data farms and cloud computing for the long term? Or are there too many Scottish players in a too small local market?

The Herald report of Lloyds back out  comes close on the heels of January news from ScotlandIS that IFB was one of a group of Scottish Data Centre operators attending the Gartner Data Center conference under the Naturally Cool banner.

Graeme Gordon, IFB operations director commented: “The US is a definite target for IFB this year. We have a number of oil sector clients in Aberdeen. This new facility will enable us to provide them with an even greater level of service.  Businesses of all sizes have already shown significant interest in our new world-class facilities, and we’re determined to translate that into new business."

Others members that attended the Vegas conference included ScoLocate, Onyx Group, brightsolid (offices Dundee, Edinburgh, London) and CloudSoft Corp,  venture-backed software company headquartered in the UK with Andromeda and Scottish Enterprise funding.

Back in July, data centre expansion players included Inverness based Alchemy Plus in Dingwell, with an Inverness city centre facility due for launch and plans to develop in both in Lerwick, Shetland and an Aberdeen site. But Alchemy has gone quiet on expansion.

Onyx opened its new Edinburgh facility  a year ago, added a new Glasgow workplace recovery centre and is on record, some time back, that it hopes to carry its expansion into the US.

Now  Lumison with a London and Edinburgh Newbrdge offices and a  Livingston facility has just started its Managed Backup+ service to provide sophisticated, secure, and flexible backup of files, databases, and applications. It had proposals to build a new £3m data centre, but these seem also to be on hold.

Internet Villages International proposals and permissions at Ecclefechan and Peelhouses near Lockerbie are now  presumably again in the market for major developers and whatever happened to the Pentland Firth proposal?

Gillespie Investments were working on a renewables powered data centre at the former Drumshangie opencast mine for the village of Plains and North Lanarkshire to host data. But this now may be on hold to be subject to its £1.9 inter family legal battle.

Looks to be some interesting datafarm, cloudcompute potential kicking around in Scotland, if the astute developers  can just be located.