Oil Rigs to Training Rigs
Between 2031 and 2041, a North Sea oil platform due for scrapping becomes the hub of a seabed AI training cluster, and Aberdeen goes back to sea.
About the Piece
Everyone else was trying to put data centres in space. Haar Compute looked at the North Sea and saw everything space was trying to fake: free cooling, free power, and a workforce that had spent fifty years putting delicate, expensive equipment on the seabed and keeping it running.
Over ten years and nine Objects, sixty-four sealed compute pods around one old platform, Skerry Alpha, become the Dyson Shoal: 7,680 pods across the floor of the central North Sea, training Britain's national models whenever the wind blows. The helicopters still leave Dyce at ten to seven. A pilot flies the same route for thirty years while the cargo changes underneath her. A blind night technician hears the pods as a chord, and hears one go out of tune. The machine learns to wait for the weather.
Everyone in it is invented. Most of what they do rests on things that are real, and the last Object says which. Some of the people here have met people from Heart Attacks.
Objects
- The cover: The cover of Oil Rigs to Training Rigs: a converted North Sea oil platform above the waves, and the ring of compute pods on the seabed beneath it. Its description comes first.
- The Ten to Seven: Morag Leask has flown the ten to seven out of Dyce for thirty years, and only the cargo has changed.
- Haar Compute takes ownership of Skerry Alpha: Haar Compute takes over the Skerry Alpha oil platform to make it the hub of the first commercial AI training cluster built around a converted oil installation.
- Subsea Compute Technician: Haar Compute wants offshore technicians to keep sixty-four compute pods running on the seabed: you already know how to do this job.
- The Chord: Daniel Okafor, Skerry Alpha’s blind night technician, hears the sixty-four pods as a chord, and hears one go out of tune.
- Skerry Alpha operations log, January 2034: Seven days of the Long Calm, when the wind stopped and the training ring kept going on batteries, hydro and hydrogen.
- The Cooling Capital: How Aberdeen, told it would die with the oil, went back to sea and became the place where Britain trains its machines.
- Dyson Shoal: Ten years after the first sixty-four pods, 7,680 of them lie on the floor of the North Sea, and nobody is entirely sure where the data centre ends.
- Behind the fiction: What in these pieces is invented, and the real things, as of mid-2026, that the fiction rests on.