A $140 million Series B funding round led by Peter Thiel will allow Panthalassa to finish its pilot manufacturing facility and deploy its first AI-powering ocean nodes.
Back
Back
Panthalassa Raises $140 Million to Power Floating AI Data Centers With Wave Energy
(P1) Panthalassa, a renewable energy startup, raised $140 million in a Series B round led by Peter Thiel to deploy massive floating data centers that run on wave power, tackling the surging energy demand from the artificial intelligence industry with a novel ocean-based solution.
(P2) “The future demands more compute than we can imagine,” said Peter Thiel. “Extra-terrestrial solutions are no longer science fiction. Panthalassa has opened the ocean frontier.”
(P3) The new funding brings Panthalassa’s total raised to $210 million and will finance the completion of its pilot manufacturing facility near Portland, Oregon. The round included new investors John Doerr, Marc Benioff’s TIME Ventures, and Max Levchin’s SciFi Ventures, alongside returning investors like Founders Fund and Lowercarbon Capital. The company plans to deploy its Ocean-3 pilot series this year, with commercial systems slated for 2027.
(P4) The investment highlights a growing push into alternative energy solutions to meet the voracious electricity needs of AI data centers. By generating and using power far from shore, Panthalassa avoids the grid capacity limits and costly transmission infrastructure that challenge land-based data centers, potentially offering a new model for sustainable computing.
On-Site Power Generation and Cooling
Panthalassa's approach involves autonomous, 85-meter-tall floating "nodes" that use the ocean's swells to drive internal turbines, generating electricity. This power is used on-board to run AI inference models, with data results transmitted to land via low-Earth-orbit satellites. The system sidesteps the historical challenge of wave energy: moving power from the ocean to the grid.
A key advantage is the use of cold ocean water for cooling the computing hardware, which eliminates a major operational expense and engineering challenge for terrestrial data centers. Co-founder and CEO Garth Sheldon-Coulson said the platform could achieve power generation costs as low as $0.02 per kWh, a price point that would make it highly competitive with land-based energy sources.
A New Frontier for Data Infrastructure
The company, founded in 2016, has spent nearly a decade developing its technology, with sea trials of its prototypes in 2021 and 2024. The team includes engineers from SpaceX, Boeing, and Tesla.
Panthalassa joins a growing field of companies seeking to decouple data center growth from the terrestrial power grid. The strategy shares parallels with Starcloud, a startup building solar-powered data centers in space, which recently raised $170 million. Other firms, like Aikido, are exploring integrating data centers with floating offshore wind platforms. However, Panthalassa’s focus on wave energy, which Sheldon-Coulson describes as “twice-concentrated sunlight,” offers a persistent power source that continues even when the wind stops.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
[1] Peter Thiel leads investment, US startup explores 'ocean data centers'[2] Data centers at sea: Oregon's Panthalassa nets $140M led by Peter Thiel for wave-powered AI[3] Panthalassa unveils wave-powered floating data center platform[4] Startup Panthalassa to power offshore AI data centers with wave energy[5] Panthalassa Raises $140 Million to Power AI at Sea
