- Panthalassa’s valuation is now close to $1 billion after new financing
- Peter Thiel led a $140 million investment round into the marine technology company
- Investors see ocean energy as a vast, untapped computing resource
US-based marine technology company Panthalassa is advancing its plan to move computing to open water, backed by new funding that puts its valuation close to $1 billion.
The start-up has spent ten years developing wave energy technology and is now backed by PayPal co-founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel, who led a $140 million investment round into the company.
“We are now ready to build factories, deploy fleets and deliver a sustainable new energy source to humanity,” said Garth Sheldon-Coulson, co-founder and CEO of Panthalassa.
Bypass the net by going offshore
Panthalassa’s idea connects two pressures that rarely meet head-on – increasing demand for AI computing and limits to land-based energy systems.
By placing both energy production and computation offshore, the company claims it can bypass grid constraints and cooling challenges.
The plan is to use the rocking motion of the waves to force water through a turbine and generate electricity to power AI chips directly at sea.
The company houses this entire system inside what it calls a node, an 85-meter-long solid steel structure that sits mostly below sea level.
A hermetically sealed container inside holds the AI server, which is cooled by the surrounding seawater.
The ships can drive themselves to their destination using the shape of their hulls, without the need for an engine or fuel.
Unlike other ocean energy projects, Panthalassa will never transmit electricity back to land—instead, AI chips on board will receive user queries via SpaceX’s Starlink satellite link and send back inference tokens in the same way.
Terawatts of unused energy
“There are three energy sources on the planet with tens of terawatts of new capacity potential: solar, nuclear and the open ocean,” Sheldon-Coulson said.
Waves are created by wind, and wind is created by heat from the sun. This means that waves are essentially doubly concentrated sunlight that keeps moving even when the wind stops.
The company’s nodes have no hinges, flaps or gearboxes that can break in hostile sea conditions, making them easier to manufacture at scale.
They use only earth-rich materials like steel with robust supply chains that support rapid deployment – a huge opportunity for data center development.
The scale of this opportunity has attracted the attention of some of Silicon Valley’s most prominent investors.
“The future requires more computation than we can imagine,” said Peter Thiel. “Extra-terrestrial solutions are no longer science fiction. Panthalassa has opened the sea border.”
John Doerr, an early investor in Google and Amazon, called Panthalassa’s system a game changer in “solving global energy needs and clean energy production”.
“It’s a triple win: workers benefit, communities benefit, and we gain a strategic asset that strengthens American technology leadership,” Doerr added.
Panthalassa plans to deploy its Ocean-3 pilot nodes in the North Pacific sometime this year, with commercial rollouts targeted for 2027.
The company has demonstrated its capabilities with Ocean-1, Ocean-2 and Wavehopper prototypes in 2021 and 2024.
However, scaling from prototypes to a commercial fleet of hundreds or thousands of nodes is a completely different challenge.
The sea is unforgiving, and maintaining floating data centers in remote waters far from any port will require logistics that no company has ever managed before.
Saltwater corrosion, biofouling and storm damage are not theoretical problems for marine equipment – they are everyday realities that have sunk many promising marine energy projects before this one.
Thiel’s money buys time and production capacity, but it does not buy immunity to the laws of physics or the hostility of the sea.
Unlike projects that lower sealed containers to the ocean floor or send server racks into orbit, these floating nodes must first survive the unpredictable surface of the open ocean before delivering any computational value.
Via Financial Times
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