The American startup Panthalassa has announced securing $140 million in a Series B funding round, with the infusion being spearheaded by a co-founder of PayPal. The firm intends to deploy these resources to finalize the construction of a demonstration production facility situated near Portland, Oregon.
Panthalassa is engineering novel infrastructure: floating offshore platforms equipped with both wave energy converters and integrated computational systems dedicated to artificial intelligence. Rather than channeling electricity to land, the company’s model promotes utilizing the power right where it’s generated—to run pre-trained AI models and data centers situated directly within the ocean.
The core of this architecture involves massive, buoyant spherical structures that convert kinetic wave energy into electrical power. The resulting computational capacity is then linked to end-users via low Earth orbit satellites.
Simultaneously, the surrounding ocean water serves as a natural coolant for the processing hardware—addressing one of the primary challenges faced by contemporary data centers amidst the escalating energy demands of AI systems.
The company’s CEO and co-founder, Garth Sheldon-Coulson, commented that this technology is specifically designed to operate in the world’s most energy-dense oceanic zones, far from coastal regions.
This concept emerged in response to the soaring electricity requirements driven by AI infrastructure, electrified transport, and industrial needs. The issue is particularly acute for data centers, as the rapid advancement of generative AI has dramatically escalated the necessity for new power sources and cooling solutions for servers.
Historically, marine wave energy has struggled with the economic hurdle posed by the high cost of building infrastructure to transmit power from sea to shore. Panthalassa seeks to bypass this limitation by effectively “relocating” the energy consumer to the ocean alongside the generation source itself.
The company’s approach bears some resemblance to the blueprint for space-based data centers, which have also seen significant capital investment interest in recent months. For instance, in March, Starcloud, a startup focused on in-space computing infrastructure, achieved a valuation exceeding $1 billion following its funding round.
“The future will demand exponentially more compute power than we can currently fathom. Extraterrestrial solutions are no longer purely the stuff of science fiction,” stated co-founder Peter Thiel.
Panthalassa was established in 2016 as a business structure intended to blend commercial objectives with the pursuit of public benefit. Over the years, the company has concentrated on developing energy generation, autonomous navigation, marine platform, and computational system technologies.
The company previously conducted sea trials for its Ocean-1, Ocean-2, and Wavehopper prototypes in 2021 and 2024. The deployment of the Ocean-3 pilot series is slated for 2026, with commercial systems anticipated to enter the market in 2027. Overall, since its inception, Panthalassa has amassed approximately $210 million in funding and currently operates with a staff of about 120 personnel.
The surge in investor interest signals that the market is beginning to view the ocean not merely as an energy reserve, but possibly as a viable platform for deploying the computational backbone of the future.
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