Panthalassa Plans to Use Seawater to Power and Cool Data Centers

A startup named Panthalassa is considering using seawater to power and cool data centers.
The investors behind it include Peter Thiel and several Silicon Valley venture capital firms.

Peter Thiel is an influential venture capitalist in Silicon Valley, co-founder of PayPal, and a precise investor in tech giants such as Facebook and SpaceX.

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On June 22, the Science and Technology Board Daily reported that while SpaceX’s “computing power to space” blueprint attracts many investors, a technical route called “ocean data center” has emerged.

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Today, Forbes quoted its report on social platforms, stating that a startup named Panthalassa (meaning “Pan-Ocean”) is considering using seawater to power and cool data centers. The startup is backed by Peter Thiel and multiple Silicon Valley venture capital institutions.

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Peter Thiel is an influential venture capitalist in Silicon Valley today, known as the “Godfather of Silicon Valley Venture Capital.” He is also a long-time ally of Elon Musk, having co-founded PayPal and precisely invested in numerous tech giants such as Facebook and SpaceX.

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Currently, Panthalassa is testing the Ocean-2 prototype unit offshore in Washington State. The equipment can be viewed as two parts: a 70-meter steel tower submerged below the sea surface, with an enlarged spherical structure exposed above the water. When ocean waves rise and fall, seawater flows up through the tower’s pipes into the top spherical water storage compartment, generating up to 1 MW of electricity. The company’s CEO, Garth Sheldon Coulson, claims: “We are the first enterprise to build such computing facilities deep in the ocean.”

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Image source: Forbes

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Panthalassa believes this technical route is more economical than SpaceX’s space data center.

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“This solution can support large-scale artificial intelligence computing, model inference, and reinforcement learning operations at the lowest cost, while achieving zero emissions throughout the process,” Sheldon said. “Our equipment is deployed in the open ocean, where wave energy is most abundant, completely different from nearshore shallow waters.” This aligns with SpaceX’s philosophy in essence, both aiming to obtain free energy, but Panthalassa is more optimistic about the logistics cost of deploying computing equipment at sea.

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In May this year, Panthalassa completed $1.
The $400 million Series B financing round includes investors such as Peter Thiel, John Doerr, TIME Ventures, SciFi Ventures, and several technology investment funds. The funds will be used to deploy the first batch of commercial equipment.

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According to the company’s plan, it will deploy hundreds of free-floating data centers in the waters between Antarctica, South America, and Africa in the future, potentially increasing to thousands. However, the report also notes that the plan still carries a significant probability of failure, as there have been numerous precedents of sophisticated equipment being damaged in the field of wave energy generation.

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It is worth noting that many data centers around the world are attempting to move from land to the ocean.

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According to reports, South Korea’s three major shipbuilders have received customer inquiries regarding orders for “floating data centers,” and each has successively initiated feasibility studies or layout plans for related businesses. China is also testing underwater data centers powered by wind turbines, intending to utilize seawater for natural cooling.

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However, using ocean waves to power data centers is still novel in the computing field. Sheldon believes that waves are “batteries storing solar energy.” He stated that waves are driven by wind, and the energy of wind originates from sunlight. Even after the sun sets and the wind stops, waves will continue to surge, providing data centers with a 24/7 uninterrupted clean energy source.

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If ocean data centers prove effective, the Panthalassa plan intends to produce carbon-free fuels using offshore power generation nodes starting from the next decade: by desalinating seawater and using electrolysis devices to split water molecules to produce fuels such as green hydrogen and green ammonia.

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