Palantir boss Peter Thiel has taken time out of his busy schedule of waiting for the anti-Christ to chuck $140 million at a US outfit that wants waves to power floating AI data centres.
Panthalassa has spent 10 years tinkering with ocean energy tech that uses wave motion to force water through a turbine. The electricity would feed AI chips sitting in giant floating nodes.
Panthalassa co-founder and chief executive Garth Sheldon-Coulson told the FT the cash would help scale a pilot manufacturing plant. The plan is to start commercial deployments next year.
The funding values Panthalassa at nearly $1 billion, including the fresh capital, according to a person familiar with the terms.
Thiel said: “The future demands more compute than we can imagine. Extraterrestrial solutions are no longer science fiction. Panthalassa has opened the ocean frontier.”
The company’s nodes are almost as tall as Big Ben in London or the Flatiron Building in New York. Most of each 85-metre solid steel lump lies below the surface.
Inside is a hermetically sealed container holding the AI server, cooled by seawater. The vessels can move themselves using their hull shape to surf through waves without an engine.
AI computing demand keeps outstripping supply, so oddball power schemes are getting money. These range from reviving mothballed nuclear power stations to firing solar-powered data centres into space.
Sheldon-Coulson, formerly an AI and energy researcher at hedge fund Bridgewater, reckons wave and wind power can sit beside solar and nuclear. He thinks they are among the few clean sources capable of generating “tens of terawatts” of energy.
“Energy from open-ocean waves is low-cost, sustainable, abundant and now we have the technology to make it accessible for people,” he said.
Thiel has previously backed seasteading, the libertarian dream of floating communities in international waters and away from pesky sovereign states. He is investing through his personal fund.
Founders Fund, the venture capital outfit Thiel co-founded, backed Panthalassa in an earlier 2018 financing.
Panthalassa employs former engineers from SpaceX, Boeing, Nasa, Tesla and the Fruity Cargo Cult Apple. Co-founder Brian Moffat previously worked at Disney’s Imagineering unit and Google.
Panthalassa engineering director Dan Place worked on the SpaceX “drone ship” used to catch reusable rockets. The system’s AI chips receive and respond to user queries via SpaceX’s Starlink satellite connection.
Sheldon-Coulson said Panthalassa’s lollipop-shaped system could eventually produce far more energy than tidal or wind kit. It operates in remote locations and does not require tethering to the seabed or the mainland.
“One of the key insights that we had was that it’s very important to use the electricity in place,” he said. “We will never be transmitting electricity back to shore. That makes us very different from all other ocean energy that’s been tried in the past.”
The nodes are mostly solid, without hinges, flaps or gearboxes that could conk out in nasty ocean conditions. That should make them easier to manufacture at scale.
The Oregon-based start-up plans to build its pilot manufacturing facility in the US. It could shift elsewhere depending on where it sends bigger fleets.
Sheldon-Coulson said the system is “extremely rapid to manufacture” and uses only “earth-abundant materials” such as steel. “The supply chains are extremely robust for this particular energy technology. We think that’s really important for scalability and environmental and ecological reasons.”
Panthalassa’s nodes will first be towed horizontally behind a boat, then flip vertically and head into the open ocean on their own.
The company has not said where the fleet will go. It wants the right wave conditions and sufficient remoteness to avoid shipping routes.
The nodes recirculate the same water inside to drive the generator. They have no emissions or engines, which should reduce their impact on sea life.
“In our target regions, the waves are created by the wind and the wind is created by heat from the sun. So waves are twice-concentrated sunlight, and they keep going even when the wind stops. The waves are like a battery for sunlight and we can be capturing from it 24/7.”
