Peter Thiel Bets $140M on Ocean-Powered Energy for AI – Moby BREAKING NEWS
Panthalassa, a renewable energy and ocean tech company named after the ocean that once surrounded the supercontinent Pangaea, got $140 million on Monday in Series B financing lead by Peter Thiel.
New investors include John Doerr, Marc Benioff’s TIME Ventures, Max Levchin’s SciFi Ventures, Susquehanna Sustainable Investments, joining returning investors Founders Fund (Thiel), Gigascale Capital, Lowercarbon Capital, Unless, and WovenEarth.
Panthalassa produces energy by building autonomous “nodes” of “floating, wave energy systems” that look like giant, mass-produced metal spheres, manufactured in coastal factories such as Oregon.
“They (the Panthalassa nodes) operate in the distant ocean, where they generate clean electricity around the clock. Rather than transmitting energy back to terrestrial grids, Panthalassa uses it directly on board to power AI chips, sending inference tokens to land via satellite,” the company said.
“The surrounding ocean provides free supercooling, addressing one of the largest engineering challenges in land-based data centers and lengthening chip lifetimes.”
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Regardless of your thoughts on Thiel, this is a possibly revolutionary way to power data centers, which, given their poor reception lately (see Utah and Kevin O’Leary’s recently approved data center project), is a three-pronged solution.
“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.”
Panthalassa has been around since 2016 and has three working prototypes: Ocean-1, Ocean-2, and Wavehopper. They’re getting ready to launch their Ocean-3 pilot series this year, with commercial systems planned for 2027. And this tech can’t come soon enough. Data insights company ICF projects U.S. electricity demand to grow at least 25% by 2030 and as much as 78% by 2050 compared to 2023 levels. Data centers consume large amounts of energy and are expected to account for about 7–12% of total U.S. electricity by 2028. In 2023, that figure was around 4.4%.
If Panthalassa can figure out a way to support and train LLMs while doing everything else a data center does at sea, it could help power the AI revolution with far less politics.
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