American billionaire Peter Thiel , co-founder of PayPal and early investor in Facebook, led a $140 million investment round in the startup Panthalassa, which plans to use wave energy for giant fleets of floating data centers .
The move, announced on Monday, May 4th, comes at a time when investors, primarily linked to Silicon Valley, are advancing in the search for energy for artificial intelligence (AI) through new frontiers of solutions.
“The future demands more computing power than we can imagine. New solutions are no longer scientific. Panthalassa opened the oceanic frontier,” Thiel told the Financial Times .
The new investment will allow the company to expand a pilot production unit in the Pacific Ocean, with the goal of starting commercial production next year.
Most of the massive steel structure, which is 85 meters long, lies below the surface, including a sealed container that houses the AI server, cooled by seawater.
The vessels can navigate autonomously to their destination, using the shape of their hull to propel themselves through the waves, without the need for an engine.
While demand for AI computing power continues to outstrip supply, a growing number of unconventional initiatives to alleviate the energy bottleneck are receiving funding, ranging from reactivating decommissioned nuclear power plants to launching solar-powered data centers into space.
“Open ocean wave energy is low-cost, sustainable, abundant, and now we have the technology to make it accessible to people,” says Garth Sheldon-Coulson, co-founder and CEO of Panthalassa, who was an AI and energy researcher at the hedge fund Bridgewater .
The investment in Panthalassa comes from Thiel's personal fund. The venture capital firm he founded, Founders Fund, had already supported the startup in a previous funding round in 2018.
Other new investors in this round include Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff; PayPal and Affirm co-founder Max Levchin; and John Doerr, an early investor in Google, Amazon, Uber, and Netscape.
Doerr described Panthalassa as a "game-changer in meeting global energy needs and generating clean energy."
The Panthalassa team, which was founded in February 2016, is made up of former engineers from companies such as SpaceX, Boeing, NASA, Tesla, and Apple.
Co-founder Brian Moffat worked in Disney's animation engineering unit and at Google, while Dan Place, director of engineering, worked on the "drone ship" that SpaceX used to capture its reusable rockets.
The system's AI chips receive and respond to user queries via SpaceX's Starlink satellite connection.
Panthalassa's lollipop-shaped system can produce far more energy than tidal or wind power because it operates in remote areas and does not need to be anchored to the ocean floor or the mainland.
The company's equipment is largely solid, without hinges, flaps, or gearboxes that could break in harsh ocean conditions. This also facilitates large-scale manufacturing.
Based in Oregon, the startup plans to build its pilot production facility in the United States, but may relocate depending on where to deploy larger fleets.
According to Sheldon-Coulson, their system is “extremely quick to manufacture” and uses only materials like steel. “The supply chains are extremely robust for this specific energy technology. We believe this is really important for scalability and for environmental and ecological reasons.”
The Panthalassa equipment will initially be towed horizontally out to sea by a boat, before being turned upright and proceeding independently into the open ocean.
The modules, which recirculate the same water internally to power the generator, have no emissions or motors, minimizing the impact on marine life.
“In the regions we are targeting, the waves are created by the wind, and the wind is created by the heat of the sun,” says Sheldon-Coulson. “The waves are like a battery for sunlight, and we can capture it 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.”
The company did not disclose where it intends to allocate its fleet, but it would likely be somewhere with suitable wave conditions and remote enough to avoid shipping lanes.
