Fiona Gauld

Fiona Gauld is the founder and chief executive of Haar Compute. She spent her career in subsea engineering, and during the long Covid winters she read the old reports of a sealed data centre sunk off Orkney, whose servers had failed at about one eighth the rate of those on land. "Everyone looked at that experiment and saw a curiosity. I looked at it and saw a job description for Aberdeen."

The idea she took to investors in 2029 had a slogan before it had a business plan: oil rigs to training rigs. The first reaction, she admits, was laughter. The second was a list of objections, most of them correct.

Everyone else is trying to put data centres in space. We looked at the North Sea and saw everything space is trying to fake. We didn't need rockets. We needed Aberdeen.

She takes the arguments against the Dyson Shoal seriously: "Every one of those arguments is fair. The difference is that we're having them in public, with numbers. Nobody had that argument about the oil until it was nearly gone." Asked why Haar funds safety assurance in Paralympic sport, she says only that she has "a professional interest in people who notice what everyone else misses."

For fifty years the North Sea paid for Britain. Then everyone assumed it was finished. It wasn't finished. We just needed a different reason to go to sea.

Behind the scenes

Fiona Gauld appears in Oil Rigs to Training Rigs, by Charlotte Joanne at Blind Ant.