Peter Thiel Leads $140 Million Series B For Panthalassa Wave-Powered AI Data Centers Near Portland

A $140 million Series B round is backing Panthalassa’s plan to build wave-powered AI data centers at sea, with the funding led by Peter Thiel and intended to complete a pilot manufacturing facility near Portland, Oregon. The company says its Ocean-3 series nodes will perform AI inference computing at sea using power generated from ocean waves, and that the nodes will use the surrounding ocean for “free supercooling.” Ars Technica describes the nodes as steel spheres bobbing on the water with a tube-like structure extending vertically down, where wave motions drive water upward to spin a turbine generator for onboard AI chips. Benjamin Lee, a computer architect and engineer at the University of Pennsylvania, told Ars that “Performing AI computation on the ocean would require transferring models to the ocean-based nodes and then responding to prompts and queries.”

“Silicon Valley investors such as Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel have bet hundreds of millions of dollars on deploying AI data centers powered by waves in the middle of the world’s oceans—a move that coincides with tech companies facing mounting challenges in building AI data center projects on land”

Ars Technica

Panthalassa’s approach, as described by TechSpot, is to move a chunk of the AI infrastructure stack off land and into deep water, running neural network workloads on towers that live entirely on wave power and seawater cooling. The company’s nodes are designed as self-contained units that do not plan to send power back to shore, while results travel to land via satellite links such as Starlink. TechSpot quotes Panthalassa’s chief executive and co-founder Garth Sheldon-Coulson saying, “We will never be transmitting electricity back to shore.” In parallel, TechRadar frames a separate Samsung-backed concept as a floating data center ship that would connect directly to power and cooling near coastal energy assets, with Samsung Heavy Industries unveiling a large floating data center ship model meant to host future versions of systems like OpenAI's ChatGPT on a waterborne platform.

Panthalassa says it plans to deploy its Ocean-3 pilot node series in the northern Pacific Ocean in 2026, with commercial deployments expected in 2027, and it is using the new capital to complete its pilot manufacturing facility near Portland, Oregon. Business Wire adds that the company’s nodes will be “mass-produced from plate steel in coastal factories” and that they will generate clean electricity around the clock while powering AI chips onboard. The funding also comes with a broader investor lineup that includes John Doerr, Marc Benioff’s TIME Ventures, Max Levchin’s SciFi Ventures, and Super Micro Computer, among others listed by Business Wire. Ars Technica notes that the move coincides with tech companies facing mounting challenges building AI data center projects on land, and it includes Benjamin Lee’s warning that ocean-based compute would require transferring models to ocean-based nodes and then responding to prompts and queries.

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Financial Times