Panthalassa

Panthalassa is a Portland, Oregon wave-energy startup building autonomous offshore power-and-compute platforms designed to run AI workloads directly at sea. Rather than transmit wave-generated electricity back to shore (the traditional marine-energy failure mode), each node houses AI chips in sealed containers cooled by the surrounding seawater and communicates over Starlink. The pitch is that the ocean solves the three constraints holding hyperscale AI back on land at once: primary energy, cooling water, and permitting speed.

Founded in 2016 by CEO Garth Sheldon-Coulson, the company operates as a public-benefit corporation and has assembled a team drawn from SpaceX, Blue Origin, Boeing, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Tesla, NASA and Los Alamos, alongside naval-architecture specialists. Its Ocean-2 prototype produced up to 50 kW during 2025 testing in Puget Sound; an Ocean-3 pilot is planned for later in 2026, with commercial deployments targeted for 2027.

In May 2026 Panthalassa raised a $140M Series B led by Peter Thiel, moving the company from research curiosity to a funded challenger in the emerging offshore-compute category. It is not yet a datacenter operator in the conventional sense: there is no announced megawatt portfolio, named hyperscale tenant, or land-based campus. It is being tracked here as a forward-looking energy-and-compute platform whose first commercial nodes would function, in effect, as floating single-tenant datacenters.