Silicon Valley investors like Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel have bet millions of dollars on deploying AI data centers powered by waves in the middle of the world’s oceans — a move that coincides with tech companies facing increasing challenges building AI data center projects on land.
According to a May 4 press release, the latest investment round of $140 million is aimed at helping the company Panthalasa complete a pilot manufacturing facility near Portland, Oregon and accelerate the deployment of wave-riding “nodes” designed to generate electrical energy. Instead of sending renewable energy to a land-based data center, floating nodes will power AI chips directly and transmit inference tokens representing the output of AI models to customers around the world via satellite link.
“The idea of Panthalassa turns the energy transmission problem into a data transmission problem,” Benjamin Lee, a computer architect and engineer at the University of Pennsylvania, told Ars. “Performing AI computations at sea will require transferring models to sea-based nodes and then responding to signals and queries.”
Each node resembles a giant steel sphere bouncing on water, with its tube-like structure extending vertically beneath the surface. The wave motion propels water upward through the tube into a pressurized reservoir, where it can be released to rotate a turbine generator that produces renewable energy for the AI chips on board.
Panthalassa claims that the node’s AI chips will be cooled using the surrounding water, which could provide another advantage over traditional data centers. “Ocean-based computations can provide massive cooling benefits because ambient temperatures are so low,” Li said. “Land-based data centers use a lot of electricity and fresh water for cooling.”
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