Portland-based startup Panthalassa has received $140 million investment to support its development of floating data centers powered by wave energy and cooled by seawater.
The funding round, which will support continued development of prototype devices and development of a pilot manufacturing facility in Vancouver, values the company at $1 billion. It was led by billionaire Peter Thiel and includes a number of other prominent investors such as John Doerr, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff’s TIME Ventures, and Paypal co-founder Max Levchin’s SciFi Ventures.
Local investor Portland Seed Fund also participated, according to a news release.
Founded in 2016, the company has been working on prototype “floating nodes” to offshore one of the biggest challenges for data centers powering artificial intelligence: their immense appetite for electricity and water for cooling computer servers.
The buoyant steel spheres — one prototype measures about 10 meters wide with a 60-meter column extending underwater — are designed to float vertically in the ocean, capturing wave energy as they as they bob up and down and force pressurized seawater up the column and though a turbine to generate electricity.
That energy, in turn, powers computing hardware on board, which process queries sent back and forth to land via satellite. The spheres are not attached to the ocean floor, are self-propelled, and surrounding seawater provides cooling for the computer hardware.
The company says the economics of the energy are compelling and the solution is highly scalable.
“There are three sources of energy on the planet with tens of terawatts of new capacity potential: solar, nuclear, and the open ocean,” Garth Sheldon-Coulson, co-founder and CEO of Panthalassa, said in a news release. “We’ve built a technology platform that operates in the planet’s most energy-dense wave regions, far from shore, and turns that resource into reliable clean power. We’re now ready to build factories, deploy fleets, and provide a sustainable new source of energy for humanity.”
Sheldon-Coulson said in an emailed statement that the company was building in “Portland and Vancouver because the Pacific Northwest has the talent, technology, fabrication capacity, and maritime infrastructure to be one of the world’s preeminent hubs for ocean energy, clean computing, and a new generation of ocean technology.”
The company has 120 employees.
Energy and water consumption for data centers have become major concerns in Oregon as the industry has expanded across the state. Oregon communities are making way for 9,100 acres of new data centers in the coming years, potentially quadrupling the industry’s footprint. Gov. Tina Kotek has established a new data center task force to consider the industry’s impact on the environment, state resources and hundreds of millions of dollars in data center tax breaks.
– Correction: The original version of this story misidentified John Doerr.