Panthalassa didn’t immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
“The future demands more compute than we can imagine,” Thiel said in a statement announcing the funding. “Extra-terrestrial solutions are no longer science fiction. Panthalassa has opened the ocean frontier.”
Panthalassa, sharing the name with the superocean that once surrounded the supercontinent of Pangaea, has designed “nodes” that sit on top of the ocean, with nearly 280-foot-long steel structures extending below the surface. The sphere at the top of the node bobs in the water, with the attached tube oscillating water within it, spinning turbines inside the structure that generate electricity. The structure also holds a hermetically sealed, or airtight, AI server that is cooled by surrounding seawater.
The company spent years designing Ocean-1 and Ocean-2 prototypes, beginning in 2021, and plans to deploy its most recent Ocean-3 system in the northern Pacific Ocean this year, with commercial deployment to follow in 2027, according to the company.
“There are three sources of energy on the planet with tens of terawatts of new capacity potential: solar, nuclear, and the open ocean,” Panthalassa cofounder and CEO Garth Sheldon-Coulson said in a statement. “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.”
According to Islam’s research, dense water can carry acoustic signals faster than air, making them vulnerable to acoustic attacks. Isolated data centers underwater can also be harder to monitor and, therefore, to identify if a component breaks.
“These two advantages can also become liabilities,” he said.
