The mind-boggling scale of the operation requires immense organisation, however Santa Claus is used to the huge task of distributing billions of presents every year.

“There would be too many controllers for Santa and the elves to oversee, so they will probably need to use something like Siri or Alexa to direct and control them,” Gopal says. “Hopefully the work we are doing in the TAS hub has helped to build a trustworthy drone system that can save Christmas.”

Gopal recommends that a customary mince pie, carrot or sweet treat could still be left out for the drones to collect this December, but a complementary charging station might prove even more useful for the seasonal swarm.

Processing such vast amounts of data would require an immensely powerful supercomputer and, if rumours are true, Santa might also soon rely on this facility to work out which gifts to assign to all the world’s children.