Scottish prawn farmer backs new data centres to support scale up

Scottish land-based warm water prawn grower RevolOcean is to begin a Series A fundraise this winter, co-founder Andrew Whiston has told LandbasedAQ.com.

The company, which recently changed its name from Rastech Ltd “to better reflect where we are and where we are heading”, currently produces around a tonne of king prawns (Litopenaeus vannamei) a year in a 30-metre-long hoop-framed pilot unit at Guardbridge, St Andrews, and plans to raise £1.85 million for an adjacent 90-metre unit that will increase annual production to 50 tonnes.

“We initially set out looking for investment to take us beyond proof-of-concept stage, but through that process we realised that, to scale responsibly, we first needed our own hatchery,” explained Whiston.

A foundation to build on

“So rather than rushing to raise, we focused on solving that. We’ve largely bootstrapped the business to this point, alongside grant support, including a Scottish Enterprise R&D grant. That enabled us to develop and prove a non-invasive, antibiotic- and chemical-free hatchery here in Scotland.

“That work gave us the foundations to scale safely. We’re now breeding, growing and selling prawns from our 1/10th-scale module. The prawns themselves have won a 3-star Great Taste Award in 2026, and we’re selling everything we grow, with a waiting list. So now we’re raising investment to scale something we already know works, rather than asking investors to fund an unproven idea.”

Interest from funders

Whiston said RevolOcean has had lots of interest in the Series A “from people who understand that what we’re building is an ecosystem, not simply a prawn farm”.

“We’ve also had plenty of ‘no thanks’ from folk who’ve discovered that building a RAS facility requires rather more CAPEX than building an app,” he added wryly.

Once it has built its 50-tonne unit at Guardbridge, RevelOcean plans a roll-out of 600-tonne-per-year farms which will each comprise 12 production buildings and will utilise waste heat from neighbouring industrial sources such as data centres or green hydrogen production. It has earmarked locations for its first four full-sized production sites in Scotland, England, Norway, and Denmark.

In a post on LinkedIn, Whiston defended the construction of new data centres from criticisms that they use too much electricity to operate and an excessive volume of water for cooling. 

“Data centres are coming. AI is making sure of that. There’s no point pretending or wishing otherwise. The choice is how we build them,” wrote Whiston, whose heavily-insulated prawn farm consumes just 8-9% of the energy that would be required for a land-based prawn farm in a conventional building.

“They (data centres) don’t have to run on diesel or gas turbines. They don’t have to depend on evaporative cooling. And all that heat doesn’t have to be thrown away. We can choose to do it differently.

Clean power and heat re-use

“Build the data centre somewhere like Norway, where the electricity is clean to begin with, and get more than one use from it.

“Don’t waste the heat. Use it to grow shrimp. Use the shrimp farm’s waste nutrients to grow crops and biomedical materials. Use what’s left to grow seaweed. Then use the water again.”

He continued: “RevolOcean is where that waste heat becomes something valuable.

“Suddenly it looks less like a data centre and more like a village built around one. Computing, food, materials and jobs, with the waste from one process becoming the input for the next.

“The data centres are going to be built anyway. So let's choose to build them where the power is clean. Stop wasting the heat and get as much value as we can from every unit of electricity.”

Backed by Bjornsgaard

RevolOcean has the support of Mark Bjornsgaard, founder and former chief executive of data centre developer Deep Green, which is now part of Octopus Energy Generation.

In a LinkedIn post this week Bjornsgaard, who is on RevolOcean’s advisory board, announced that he was in Norway for Arendal Week, an annual festival and venue for politicians, organisations, businesses, and the public to come together to discuss societal issues.

Bjornsgaard, who now runs venture capital company System Two and remains as chief innovation officer for Deep Green, said he was in Arendal “talking about building very large data centres - and siting them with equally large RevolOcean aquaculture.... all part of the grand plan to meet Net Zero commitments, build as much AI as we all need - all whilst providing local communities jobs and hope in the climate emergency”.