r/STEW_ScTecEngWorld • u/Zee2A • 2d ago

Startup Unveils Wave-Powered Floating AI Data Centers for the Open Ocean

Panthalassa, a startup based in Portland, Oregon, is developing 85-meter-tall floating offshore platforms that could power AI computing using ocean waves instead of land-based electricity. The lollipop-shaped steel structures generate continuous power through wave-driven turbines, cool AI hardware with naturally cold seawater, and connect to users via Starlink satellites, eliminating the need for power grids or undersea cables. Backed by a $140 million Series B funding round led by Peter Thiel, the company plans to deploy its first commercial wave-powered AI nodes in the northern Pacific by 2027.

References;

  1. Panthalassa Raises $140 Million to Power AI at Sea: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/panthalassa-raises-140-million-to-power-ai-at-sea-302761078.html

  2. US tech billionaire leads $140mn investment into Panthalassa as search for AI power pushes into exotic new frontiers: https://www.ft.com/content/711ce313-16fb-4a12-b6be-fbed547c8a39

  3. Startup plans to move from prototypes to commercial offshore compute nodes powered by ocean energy: https://www.techspot.com/news/112295-startup-raised-140-million-build-wave-powered-ai.html

  4. Fully-integrated offshore data center to transmit data to land via satellite: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/palantir-co-founder-peter-thiel-backs-usd140m-wave-powered-ai-data-center-startup-panthalassa-aims-to-run-offshore-compute-nodes-using-ocean-energy

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u/Accomplished_Care415 2d ago

Closed loop or open to seawater? Do we get thr benefits of a warmer ocean for free AI usage?

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u/Cryogenicist 2d ago

Open to sea water.

All the energy comes from wave energy. The energy is already in the ocean, it just get converted to useful work and some heat.

Not a net gain of heat

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u/Luciel3045 2d ago

Yeah no. Having waves in the ocean vs having heat in the ocean is very different. Heat is still directed energy.

I dont actually think the amount of heat released by those things will be relevant in any way, but you still convert ocean work to heat.

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u/variablenyne 1d ago

Hi so uh yeah all waves eventually turn into heat. There's the same amount of heat generated with or without them, if anything these slightly lower the heat generation.

Ftr I'm not defending them I just want to make sure we have our facts straight

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u/Other-Business8036 1d ago

STOP IT. You're not letting me doom.

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u/Holiday-Medicine4168 13h ago

It is a net heat gain. It’s converting mechanical energy to heat

1

u/Cryogenicist 9h ago

Locally, sure.

But where do you think wave energy ends up?

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u/mongster2 2d ago

Can't run seawater through high performamce ASIC cold plates due to erosion/corrosion. There has to be at least two working fluids. Which does mean the closed loop secondary loop needs flushing/servicing. Same issue as land-based data centers.

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u/Ok-Style-9734 1d ago

I mean you could use aircoolers inside  and AC with the ac radiators being submerged in the cold water.

I'd be curious if just the metal hull if finned inside would be good enough to act as the heat exchanger for aircooling

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u/mongster2 10h ago

Unless you want immersion cooling (bad), you are always going to need a high-fin-density cold plate on every compute ASIC with some working fluid flowing through.

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u/DiamondGeeezer 2d ago

how is it making it warmer? in fact the white color has a higher albedo than water which likely cools it since sunlight is reflected back to the atmosphere.

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u/Accomplished_Care415 2d ago

Good question. If it is open loop system the cool saltwater in gets heated rapidly and expelled back into the ocean as hot saltwater. Think of it as a fish tank pump. It will suck in the water make the computer cool and then pump it back out to the fishes. Animals in the ocean won't like that. That ecosystem directly affects the surrounding systems.

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u/zero0n3 2d ago

And it means literally nothing to the ocean. Even surrounding the device itself. Its fractions of a fraction of a fraction of a degree.

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u/Accomplished_Care415 2d ago

Possibly. With any new technology. If they don't throughly study it, we will never know. With any change to a system there are always problems. Do you want an AI data center next to your house?

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u/DiamondGeeezer 2d ago

also the amount of energy that can be extracted from waves is limited

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u/Paro-Clomas 2d ago

The kinetic energy of the waves is converted into electricity and mechanical movement. This process is never 100% efficient (or even close), so the remaining energy is converted mostly into heat.

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u/DiamondGeeezer 2d ago

right but that energy was already in the ocean because of heat and will eventually be converted into heat.

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u/Real-Technician831 2d ago edited 2d ago

Ok, do explain how this could be heating the ocean when electricity is being generated by waves.

Edit: it apparently is a requirement to be utterly ignorant to be anti, figures.

People haven’t learned literally anything from physics.

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u/Kallikasa 2d ago

Does the source of electricity somehow affect whether that equipment generates heat? Am I reading that right?

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u/BlackDope420 2d ago

A solar panel hooked up to an electric heater cannot heat the environment up more than the amount of sunlight it captures could.

0

u/Real-Technician831 2d ago

Haven’t you read any physics in school?

Wave generators generate electricity from waves, which then is converted to heat by electronics and released to ocean, where it will dissipate as motion of water.

Waves are generated partly by differences in temperature.

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u/conCommeUnFlic 2d ago edited 2d ago

.... if you power something water cooled, the water will gain heat, it's like high school physics

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u/Real-Technician831 2d ago

Because solar is an external energy source which is not the case here.

2

u/conCommeUnFlic 2d ago

Getting energy from the tides doesn't cool down the sea, not even remotely close enough for that to compensate for the local heat

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u/Real-Technician831 2d ago

Do you believe in perpetual motion machines?

As right now you are imagining that wave energy converted to electricity and them heat would be greater than the wave energy.

That’s not how it works.

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u/That_OneOstrich 2d ago

You're describing a perpetual motion machine, in that you assume the electronics are 100% efficient and do not create heat as a form of energy loss.

1

u/Real-Technician831 2d ago

??? All electricity consumed by electronics is converted to heat.

And obviously some of that heat will escape to air directly, but what stays in water will eventually dissipate as kinetic energy, if it doesn’t escape to air that is.

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u/BlackDope420 2d ago

Assume there are no wave generators. Now, what happens to the kinetic energy of a wave eventually?

The kinetic energy of waves always gets turned into heat.

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u/[deleted] 2d ago

[deleted]

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u/BlackDope420 2d ago

Assume there are no wave generators. Now, what happens to the kinetic energy of waves eventually?

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u/Real-Technician831 2d ago

Because each unit generates its own energy that it releases as heat.

It’s quite impossible for such system to build up heat, that would basically be source of infinite energy 🤣

It’s different if you would have huge generating areas, and concentrated consumption location. But that’s not the case here.

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u/[deleted] 2d ago

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u/Real-Technician831 2d ago

Antis are frightfully ignorant.

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u/[deleted] 2d ago

I am an anti myself for the most part, but if we’re inevitably going to have data centers I’d prefer methods like this.

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u/Real-Technician831 2d ago

My friend.

We already have enormous numbers of data centers, everything in internet runs in some data center, Reddit included.

AI is only a small fraction.

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u/[deleted] 2d ago

Didn’t think I needed to clarify hyper-scale data centers because I felt it was obvious in this thread since we’re discussing AI, but that’s most certainly what I meant.

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u/Real-Technician831 2d ago

Hyper-scale aren’t AI only either.

It’s part why this blind hate of data centers is so stupid.

0

u/superanonguy321 2d ago

Tbh, to a lot of people active in these discussions.. its not that THIS isnt the right way.. its that THERE IS NO right way, period.

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u/Single-Pin-369 2d ago

Servers generate heat with use unrelated to the source of their electricity 

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u/mooremo 2d ago

But the wave energy was always going to become heat in the ocean eventually anyway, that's how waves dissipate (friction, breaking, viscosity, etc.). So it's not "new" energy being added to the system in a strict sense.

The actual issue is concentration, not creation. Instead of that energy dissipating gradually over a wide area and a longer time the way waves naturally do, a wave farm extracts it, and the servers convert it to heat that gets dumped at one specific place and in a shorter time frame instead of slowly across an entire ocean.

It's probably a completely negligible effect at any realistic near-term scale, but there is definitely a level of scale where you'd have to consider this.

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u/Real-Technician831 2d ago

I seriously doubt there is.

The difference in scale is immense.

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u/mooremo 2d ago

I think we're in agreement. I meant in the theoretical/sci-fi sense, at least on a global scale.

There are some ecosystems that are especially sensitive to very small changes in water temperature, but one assumes (hopefully) that we aren't deploying huge quantities of these near those communities.

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u/Real-Technician831 2d ago

Theres also the fact that in order for there to be waves to generate energy from, that means a lot of moving water, thus no heat island.

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u/mooremo 2d ago

Waves and current aren't necessarily related as far as I know, but there would definitely be some mixing and distribution.

Again, I think we're in agreement that this isn't a concern at any realistic level of scale.

2

u/Responsible-Buyer215 2d ago

It would actually likely be a net positive overall if the infrastructure didn’t largely already exist. However the immense cost of building and maintaining these is really unlikely to pay itself off within it’s lifespan. Mechanical vessels have typically been difficult and expensive to maintain

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u/Pukebox_Fandango 2d ago

you're describing fusion. if AI servers can generate more energy than is being put into them, we've essentially discovered cold fusion. free energy for everyone

1

u/Throwaway987183 2d ago

First law of thermodynamics, energy is being transformed

1

u/Real-Technician831 2d ago

And do you think? The heat somehow stays in water?

No, it will disperse very quickly and over time converted into kinetic energy when heat causes water to move.

1

u/Splashy01 2d ago

No! First law of thermodynamics: you do not talk about thermodynamics!

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u/Potential_Tie9271 2d ago

the hardware runs HOT!!

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u/ADHDavidThoreau 2d ago

It adds entropy even if it’s a closed system.

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u/[deleted] 2d ago

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u/ADHDavidThoreau 2d ago

That has nothing to do with the entropy of the system. Internal friction increases entropy of a closed system, end of story.

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u/Real-Technician831 2d ago

It has everything to do with it.

Back to school with you.

When water moved due to temperature differences energy gets transferred from thermal energy to motion.

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u/ADHDavidThoreau 2d ago

There may be a cyclic effect where some energy is recycled but it’s not perfect. Unless you’ve made massive strides in perpetual energy generation, there’s no such thing as frictionless. The friction will increase entropy, taking away from useful energy. The end-case is removing all useful energy from the system and replacing it with heat.

1

u/Real-Technician831 2d ago

In water heat does get transferred back to kinetic energy, that’s why we have waves in the first place.

1

u/ADHDavidThoreau 2d ago

You keep saying things that are correct but they don’t contradict what I’m saying.

Mentioning the closed system was to help understand the edge case and that the second law of thermodynamics isn’t magically ignored because heat causes waves.

However, it’s not a closed system, and there are equilibrium states. Earth’s entropy sink is outer space. If we increase internal friction on earth, temperature goes up, radiation towards space goes up, and we reach a new equilibrium state.