Here are the business stories making the headlines across Scotland and the UK this morning.
Aberdeen city centre Halfords to close permanently as £1.4m move scrapped
Halfords is closing its Aberdeen city centre garage permanently after plans for a £1.4million move to a new site were axed due to skyrocketing costs.
Staff at the St Clair Street branch are at risk of redundancy after the rising price tag scuppered a relocation to the former Aberdeen Wood Centre on St Machar Road.
The garage will shut on September 30 with 10 people understood to be at risk.
Read the P&J exclusive here.
Loganair confirms withdrawal of all Dundee operations
Loganair has confirmed it is withdrawing all of its operations from Dundee Airport.
It comes after the airline announced it would end its service from Dundee to London Heathrow on 23 October.
The public service obligation (PSO) route is supported by the local authority and the Scottish and UK governments.
Read more on the BBC website.
Fast food joint Beef King reveals plans for Aberdeen store
A popular fast food joint is making its way to Aberdeen as bosses set their sights on the city centre.
Beef King has revealed they will open a second store in the north-east following the success of their Stonehaven premises.
George Street is to soon become home to the chain with an expected September launch.
Find out more in The Press and Journal.
Lack of skilled farm workers ‘threatens UK food security’
The dairy giant behind Lurpak and Cravendale has warned that a shortage of skilled young workers threatens Britain’s food security.
Arla Foods, a large dairy co-operative which supplies British largest supermarkets, said its farmers were struggling to fill vacancies because of a lack of qualified candidates, while more than half reported that retaining employees had become harder since Brexit and Covid.
Some 82 per cent of dairy farmers with a vacancy said that either “very few” or “no” job applicants had the right skills, according to a survey by the company.
Read the full story in The Times.
Debt warning as tech giants spend $1trn on future data centre leases
Five of the world’s biggest technology companies have racked up $1trillion in off-balance sheet spending commitments to drive the AI revolution, potentially masking the long-term debt liabilities underpinning the boom, analysts have warned.
Goldman Sachs has calculated that the indebtedness of the so-called hyperscalers could be “understated” as a result of the accounting practice.
The figures highlight the vast scale of cash being mobilised in the global scramble for the computing capacity needed to power AI, with leases sometimes agreed a decade in advance.
Read The Times' story here.