The round was led by billionaire Peter Thiel through a personal fund. According to the Financial Times, Gigascale Capital, Lowercarbon Capital, Unless and a number of prominent tech investors including Marc Benioff, Max Levchin and John Doerr also participated in the funding, forklog.com reported.
According to Panthalassa CEO Garth Sheldon-Coulson, the proceeds will be used to complete a pilot manufacturing plant in the U.S. and prepare for the deployment of the first commercial Ocean-3 nodes in the Pacific Ocean.
Data center in the ocean
Panthalassa is building computing nodes for artificial intelligence. Each is an 85-meter-long steel autonomous platform.
The platforms are planned to be placed in the open ocean. In the first phase, they are expected to be towed horizontally through the water. Then they will flip to a vertical position and will be able to reach the location without an engine – due to a special hull shape that uses the energy of waves.
The company does not disclose the exact coordinates: we are talking about remote areas of the Pacific Ocean outside of shipping routes.
Electricity is generated by the movement of water through built-in turbines and powers AI servers right on board. The results of calculations are transmitted to customers via SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network.
Placement in the ocean solves the cooling problem: seawater is used to dissipate heat, which extends the life of the chips.
Representatives of the startup claim that they have already tested several prototypes – Ocean-1, Ocean-2 and Wavehopper – in real conditions. The commercial launch of the first full-fledged Ocean-3 is scheduled for 2027.
Non-standard energy sources for AI
Investor interest in Panthalassa is due to the rapidly growing shortage of computing power. Against the backdrop of the AI boom, the market is already looking for non-standard power sources for data centers – from nuclear reactor restarts to space-based solar stations.
Peter Thiel called the startup idea entering “a new oceanic frontier of computing.” According to him, the demand for computing will be enormous, and the search for new energy sources is no longer a science fiction.
The head of Panthalassa noted that open ocean energy could be one of the few truly scalable clean sources capable of producing tens of terawatts of power – along with the sun, wind and the atom.
