From sea lice to shared intelligence: Norway’s data revolution in aquaculture

In this episode of BlueTech Around the World, we head to Bergen, Norway (the global heart of salmon aquaculture), to explore how a shared data platform called AquaCloud is reshaping one of the country’s biggest industries.

Joining me is Björgólfur “Boggi” Hávarðsson, a marine biologist turned digital transformation lead at AquaCloud, a company born inside the Seafood Innovation Cluster and now operating as an independent data powerhouse.

Its mission? Simple, radical, and maybe a little utopian:“To make fish farmers better, together.”

The parasite that started a data movement

Every revolution begins with a problem. In Norwegian aquaculture, that problem has a name: sea lice.

These tiny crustaceans, invisible to the naked eye at first, attach to salmon in open-sea cages. Like head lice on schoolchildren, they feed on the skin and mucus, weakening fish and spreading rapidly with ocean currents.

Each year, sea lice cost the global salmon industry over one billion euros in lost growth, treatments, and fish stress.

It’s much better to avoid the problem than to be really good at treating it,” said Boggi with a grin. “Counting money is one thing, counting suffering is another.”

Sea lice became the catalyst for AquaCloud’s creation. The industry realized that to fight a shared biological enemy, it needed a shared information base, real-time environmental and operational data, standardized and anonymized across farms and regions.

Building a data ecosystem: from competition to collaboration

When AquaCloud was launched eight years ago, it wasn’t a tech project, it was a trust project. Rival companies had to agree on what to share, what to protect, and how to prevent sensitive information from being misused.

"Good governance is the floor you stand on. Without it, you go nowhere — fast,” Boggi explained.

Each member signs detailed agreements defining data ownership, responsibilities, and limits. Market-sensitive data such as biomass, feed volumes, or acute mortalities are never shared in real time. Instead, they’re normalized and aggregated by region to ensure privacy and compliance.

“We designed it like medical data,” said Boggi. “You assume the strictest standard, and then engineer out the risks.”

Over time, AquaCloud grew into a true consortium, where small family-run farms and corporate giants access the same dashboards and benefit from the same collective intelligence.

What AquaCloud measures ? And why it matters ?

Every day, Norwegian fish farms upload over 60 standardized parameters to AquaCloud. From fish size, biomass, and mortalities to water temperature, oxygen, salinity, feeding behavior, and detailed sea-lice counts by life stage, the platform paints a near real-time picture of coastal ecosystems.

The data helps farmers anticipate threats, like rising sea-lice pressure, oxygen drops, or harmful algal blooms, days or even weeks before they hit.

Researchers can now access harmonized datasets in days rather than months, accelerating studies on fish health and environmental impacts.

“It’s not about control,” Boggi clarified. “It’s about awareness. Knowing what’s happening in your neighborhood before the current brings it to you.”

The unsung hero: standardization

Before AquaCloud, Norwegian farmers used their own terms, metrics, and languages for almost everything, from lice stages to mortality causes.

“I counted at least fifteen different names for the same lice stage,” laughed Boggi. “The only thing missing was a swear word.”

Together with Norsk Standard, AquaCloud helped publish a national data dictionary that defines how terms are written, measured, and interpreted. This standardization now underpins the country’s aquaculture data ecosystem, allowing researchers, regulators, and farmers to speak the same digital language.

“It’s boring work,” Boggi admitted, “but boring is powerful. Once you agree on words, everything else becomes faster.”

The business model: when data becomes an asset

AquaCloud isn’t a public database. It’s a data marketplace where curated, permissioned datasets can be purchased or licensed.

Researchers and universities remain its main clients today, but demand from banks, insurers, and tech companies is rising fast. Data requests are approved by a cross-company ethics group and priced based on parameters, granularity, and update frequency.

The team is also preparing to launch an open sandbox, an anonymized data environment for students and developers to test ideas, ahead of the next Ocean Hackathon.

“We need creative chaos,” Boggi said. “Give smart people good data, and they’ll find gold in the gravel.”

(Yes, we both agreed it’s time for the first-ever aquaculture challenge at the Ocean Hackathon.)

The human side of data

For Boggi, technology is only half the story. The other half is trust.

“Ethics isn’t a chapter in a report — it’s the core of the system,” he said.

Every company, large or small, signs the same contract and receives the same access. No one is excluded from the collective intelligence being built.

Beyond sensors: digital transformation in action

Digitalization installs sensors. Digital transformation changes behavior.

In Norway, AquaCloud’s impact shows in how farms are managed:

• Sites are chosen based on current patterns and risk history.

• Biosecurity plans draw on multi-year trend data.

• Some farms now use QR codes to give consumers transparency on fish welfare and environmental conditions.

“Nobody says ‘we’re doing electrification,’” Boggi joked. “We talk about what electricity lets us do. Digital should be the same.”

With the foundations built, the next challenge isn’t collecting data, it’s imagining what to do with it.

What’s next: Boggi’s notes from the near future

When I asked Boggi what the next decade will bring, he smiled like someone who’s already been there.

His predictions aren’t science fiction, they’re the logical evolution of today’s data.

Part realism, part vision, all rooted in the water.

Proactive aquaculture

With better data models and real-time environmental tracking, fish farming is shifting from reaction to prevention.

Instead of waiting for sea lice to appear, farmers can now anticipate outbreaks days or even weeks in advance. Predictive maps combine temperature, salinity, and current patterns to highlight areas where parasites are likely to thrive, like a weather forecast for aquaculture.

These lice risk maps allow farms to plan movements, adjust feeding regimes, or coordinate treatments regionally so that neighboring farms act together, not one after another. It’s a subtle but profound change: aquaculture becomes dynamic and responsive, where decision-making follows data, not panic.

“When everyone sees the same warning, nobody is left fighting alone,” Boggi said. “That’s the beauty of shared intelligence.”

Deeper and smarter farms

As the oceans warm with climate change, shallow coastal waters are becoming more stressful for salmon: rising temperatures, lower oxygen levels, and faster parasite reproduction.

Sea lice, for instance, thrive in the top layers of the water column, usually above 20 meters. Below 25 or 30 meters, they struggle to survive.

That’s why Norway is now experimenting with deeper cages and semi-offshore farms, where the top of the nets sits well below the “lice zone.” At those depths, the water is cooler, calmer, and more stable, perfect for fish, but invisible to humans.

To compensate, farmers rely on cameras, sonar, and environmental sensors sending live data to onshore control rooms.

“We already have feeding centrals managing eight sites from one office,” Boggi said. “Once you can see, you don’t need to stand on the cage. Geography becomes optional.”

Mobile, offshore, seasonal farms

In the north, some fjords double as cod spawning grounds in winter. Boggi envisions mobile farms that shift with seasons, leaving areas during spawning, returning in summer.

“It’s the ocean version of transhumance,” he said, “moving with nature, not against it.”

As farms move further from the coast to escape warmer waters and limited space, automation becomes a survival skill. Rough seas, long distances, and fewer people mean operations must be managed remotely or autonomously.

That’s where robots enter the story.

Robots that live underwater

In today’s farms, divers and ROVs perform routine inspections and net cleaning.

In tomorrow’s, resident robots will make up a permanent workforce: compact underwater drones living in small garages under the pens, charging themselves, inspecting moorings, cleaning biofouling, and sending data home.

When something unusual happens (a tear in the net, an unexpected movement, a behavioral anomaly) they’ll investigate automatically.

“They’ll gossip to each other,” Boggi joked. “Take better pictures there, check that sensor again. Like ants, only wetter.”

Offshore, those autonomous teams will be essential, working in sync with aerial drones and onshore AI systems that coordinate missions based on live data.

AI and federated intelligence

If robots are the eyes and hands of future farms, AI will be the brain, but not a single brain.

Boggi’s vision is federated intelligence: instead of sending everyone’s raw data to one central server, small AI models travel to each farm, learn from local data, and return only insights : patterns, alerts, optimized parameters.

“The data stays home,” Boggi explained. “Only the wisdom travels.”

Those insights are then combined and redistributed, improving the next generation of models without ever exposing private datasets.

The result? A learning network that gets smarter with every cycle safely.

“You flip the whole paradigm,” said Boggi. “At first it’s slow. Then iteration three, four, five and suddenly, boom. Understanding explodes.”

This is the foundation of the next evolution in aquaculture: distributed intelligence that protects privacy while amplifying knowledge across an entire ecosystem.

The bigger picture: data as a new ocean commons

AquaCloud didn’t erase competition; it built a shared foundation for smarter competition, one where sustainability and efficiency align.

By turning data into a common good, the platform is redefining how industries can collaborate without compromising privacy or performance.

Each farm’s daily upload becomes part of a living regional intelligence : a shared ocean memory built one dataset at a time.

“Every morning, I wake up responsible, in a tiny way, for 600 million individuals,” Boggi told me as we wrapped up. “I need them healthy. I need them to become ethical food. If that’s not a good use of analytics, I don’t know what is.”

AquaCloud is more than a data platform, it’s a blueprint for how ocean industries can collaborate around shared challenges and still thrive.

As Norway’s salmon swim through connected fjords, so does their data, silently powering a smarter, more sustainable blue economy.

And maybe, at the next Ocean Hackathon, we’ll see the first open dataset challenge for aquaculture, because when data flows freely, innovation follows.

Listen to the full conversation with Björgólfur Hávarðsson on your favorite podcast app, or watch the video on YouTube.

To learn more about Aquacloud.

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