Silicon Valley investors like Palantir Co-founder Peter Thiel has bet hundreds of millions of dollars on deploying wave-powered AI data centers in the middle of the world’s oceans, a move that coincides with technology companies facing growing challenges in building AI data center projects on land.
the latest investment $140 million round is intended to help the company Pantalassa complete a pilot manufacturing facility near Portland, Oregon, and accelerate the deployment of wave-riding “nodes” designed to generate electrical power, according to a May 4 press release. Instead of sending renewable energy to a terrestrial data center, the floating nodes would directly power the integrated AI chips and transmit inference tokens representing the results of the AI models to clients around the world via a satellite link.
“Panthalassa’s idea transforms a power transmission problem into a data transmission problem.” Benjamin Leean architect and computer engineer at the University of Pennsylvania told Ars. “Performing AI calculations in the ocean would require transferring models to ocean nodes and then responding to prompts and queries.”
Each node resembles a huge steel sphere bobbing in the water with a tube-like structure extending vertically below the surface. Wave movements propel the water up through the tube into a pressurized reservoir, where it can be released to spin a turbine generator that produces renewable energy for onboard AI chips.
Panthalassa says the node’s AI chips would also be cooled using surrounding water, which could offer another advantage over traditional data centers. “Ocean-based computing could offer a huge cooling advantage because the ambient temperature is so low,” Lee said. “Terrestrial data centers use a lot of electricity and fresh water to cool.”
