Norwegian Lobster Farm: From EIC Accelerator Grant to Robot Farm

European lobster is one of the most expensive shellfish in the world, and one of the hardest to farm: kept together, the animals eat each other. Norwegian Lobster Farm, a company from the islands north of Stavanger, has spent more than 25 years trying to make the alternative pay, raising every lobster in its own cell and letting robots and cameras do the feeding and checking. In the 5 June 2019 cut-off the European Commission selected the company under the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the Horizon 2020 pilot of what is now the EIC Accelerator, for AUTOMARUS, a "Novel Automated System for Farming of European Lobster". The list names no other company for the project. The EU contribution was €1,313,112.50 towards a total cost of €1,875,875, as a grant only.

Seven years later the company is still trading and still small. In July 2025 its chief executive Asbjørn Drengstig told the Norwegian broadcaster NRK that the world's first commercial land-based lobster farm was about to start, after "over 25 years of trial and error and 50 million kroner". Its 2025 accounts, filed with the Brønnøysund Register Centre, book NOK 189,843 of sales for that year.

Where the Company Stands

Norwegian Lobster Farm is active. The Norwegian company register lists it with 11 employees, no bankruptcy or liquidation, and share capital of NOK 9,559,900 since 4 June 2024, and its notices show approved annual accounts for 2025 published on 7 July 2026. The company registered in 1999 under another name and has carried the name Norwegian Lobster Farm since January 2013, after a 2012 merger; it had already used the name from 2008 to 2010. The company's own history starts in 2000, while NRK dates the work to 1999.

Its product is a branded portion lobster, BabyBlue, harvested young at about 100 grams. The company's website says BabyBlue "was launched on the market in 2025"; the web agency that built the site, Inari, says 2024. The site quotes chefs and a statement attributed to the Copenhagen restaurant Noma that it "anticipates bulk deliveries as soon as possible". No order or delivery contract with Noma or any other buyer has been announced, and the 2025 sales figure points to small deliveries.

The Technology: One Lobster, One Cell, One Robot

Lobster farming has failed for decades on one problem. Young lobsters are territorial and cannibalistic, so each needs its own compartment, and feeding and inspecting thousands of separate compartments by hand costs more than the lobster sells for. Another Norwegian company, Norsk Hummer Drift, took a different route with its own 2015 EU grant, SELAM: hatching lobsters on land and releasing the juveniles to grow at sea, known as sea ranching, "without human interference".

Norwegian Lobster Farm keeps the animals on land for their whole life. According to the CORDIS results summary, each lobster lives in its own cell in a stacked rig, a feeding robot doses dry feed into each cell, and an image processing system follows growth and moulting so the lobster is harvested once its new shell has filled with meat. The project's chief engineer said the dispenser leaves "insignificant feed waste". Lobsters grow fastest at 20 °C, so the water has to be heated. The original design recirculated 95% of the seawater (a recirculating aquaculture system, or RAS). During the project the company switched to a simpler flow-through design using warm water that a data centre had already used for cooling.

The approach is not new to the company. A 2007 article co-written by Drengstig for the Global Seafood Alliance described a module on Kvitsøy producing "around 3 metric tons" a year, robotic feeding and image analysis, a process patented in 23 countries, and plans to reach about 70 tonnes within a few years. That did not happen. In May 2011 a fire at the lobster museum on Kvitsøy also damaged the neighbouring Norwegian Lobster Farm building, NRK reported, and the trade site iLaks wrote in 2014 that the fire destroyed the building holding the larvae and broodstock and, with the financial crisis, pushed the company to test production in Spain and Iceland.

What AUTOMARUS Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The grant agreement was signed on 17 October 2019 and the project ran from 1 November 2019 to 31 July 2022. Its stated aim was to "mature, prototype, pilot and implement" the first RAS-based farm for European lobster with automated feeding, real-time monitoring and robotic handling, and the company promised a production target of 1,000 tonnes by the fifth year after the project, a 16% share of European lobster production. The final periodic report says the company built a TRL8 prototype, "completed all tasks and submitted all deliverables", and was "ready for a commercial launch and scale-up". It gives no production volumes, survival figures for the on-growing stage or sales.

1. Automated feeding, camera monitoring and robotic handlingDeliveredTRL8 prototype per the CORDIS report; rig shown in its images and on the company website.
2. RAS-based production farmChangedSwitched to flow-through seawater warmed by a data centre during the project.
3. Large-scale pilot and commercial launchLateFarm due in 2022, "final stretch" in July 2025; 2025 sales NOK 189,843.
4. 1,000 tonnes by year five after the projectNot on trackLatest public target is 30 tonnes a year; no output figure published.

The engineering promise was kept on the company's own account: the rig exists, and CORDIS published images of it. What the project was meant to unlock, a commercial farm on the way to industrial volumes, came late and at a fraction of the planned scale. No independent test of the rig's survival, growth or cost figures has been published.

The Data Centre Farm

Halfway through the project, in June 2021, the data centre operator Green Mountain announced that Norwegian Lobster Farm would build a production plant beside its DC1-Stavanger site on Rennesøy. The data centre cools its servers with fjord water that enters at 8 °C and leaves at 20 °C, the temperature lobsters need. Drengstig said the deal would let the company "scale up production, reduce technical risk, and save both" capital and operating costs, and Fish Farming Expert reported that construction was planned for 2021. The International Institute of Refrigeration reported that the facility "should open in 2022, and produce lobsters for restaurants within a year".

Four years later NRK described the company as working in leased premises at the Green Mountain data centre and "going into the final stretch" towards production of 30 tonnes a year, or about 300,000 lobsters of 100 grams each. The company's website now presents 2025 as "full-scale commercial success" at that scale. The accounts do not show it: 2025 sales were NOK 189,843 and closing inventory NOK 188,000. Whether the farm reached its full capacity in 2026 could not be verified.

The Money

The register's public accounts cover 2023 to 2025. Operating income was NOK 1.93 million in 2023, NOK 1.83 million in 2024 and NOK 2.67 million in 2025, of which only NOK 189,843 is booked as sales; the register does not break down the rest. Net losses were NOK 2.04 million, NOK 4.03 million and NOK 3.60 million. Wage costs rose from NOK 581,277 to NOK 1.66 million over the three years. The accounts could be checked only in the Brønnøysund data, since the commercial services North Data and Proff do not show the figures without a subscription.

The turning point was 2024. Share capital went from NOK 6,258,300, registered in December 2021, to NOK 9,559,900 in June 2024, and equity rose from NOK 3.49 million to NOK 20.56 million in that year despite the loss, which implies about NOK 21.1 million of new capital, by this article's calculation. Cash at the end of 2024 was NOK 8.07 million, and fixed assets grew from NOK 6.32 million at the end of 2023 to NOK 15.03 million at the end of 2025. Who bought the new shares is not public; North Data lists two known shareholders. The company is not in the EIC Fund portfolio, which is consistent with its grant-only award. NRK names EU support, Norway's state development fund and private money from the founders as the sources of the NOK 50 million spent over 25 years.

Its only other EU-backed project on record is DEVAELA, a 2016 to 2018 Eurostars project to automate tracking, feeding and handling of lobsters in single cages, coordinated by Norsk Hummer Drift AS with Norwegian Lobster Farm and Denmark's Blue Ocean Robotics as partners, according to ERA-LEARN. A CORDIS search finds no other project with the company as a participant.

Why Europe Should Care

European lobster stocks collapsed in the 1950s and "have not recovered in the decades since", the AUTOMARUS objective notes; in June 2025 the Norwegian Directorate of Fisheries proposed new lobster conservation areas along the coast. The Commission's strategic guidelines for EU aquaculture 2021 to 2030 call for more resilient and competitive farmed seafood, a greener sector and more innovation. A farm that uses heat a data centre would otherwise dump into a fjord, and that releases part of its juveniles to the wild as the company told CORDIS it does, fits those goals closely. The open question is cost: a farm of a few tonnes says little about whether lobster in single cells can be produced at a price beyond the top restaurant market.

The Verdict

Norwegian Lobster Farm has not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.