Panthalassa Raises $140 Million to Build Wave-Powered Floating Data Centers

Panthalassa raised $140 million in a Series B round in May 2026 to fund its first commercial deployment of floating data centers. The round drew participation from Peter Thiel, John Doerr, Marc Benioff’s TIME Ventures, Max Levchin’s SciFi Ventures, and Gigascale Capital. The Portland, Oregon company began testing its Ocean-2 prototype off the coast of Washington state in 2025.

The 70-meter steel tower generates up to one megawatt of continuous electricity from wave action while cooling its systems with seawater. Panthalassa expects commercial units to be operational in 2027. The next unit will carry chips for AI learning operations and transmit data via satellite.

He earned a master’s degree at MIT and a law degree at Harvard before cofounding the company in 2016 with engineer Brian Moffatt. Chief Engineer Daniel Place previously worked at SpaceX. Other engineering staff came from Google, Blue Origin, Apple, Boeing, Amazon, and Tesla.

Panthalassa intends to place hundreds to thousands of free-floating nodes in the seas between the South Pole, South America, and Africa. The nodes have no seafloor connection and are self-propelled. They operate in deep water where wave energy is strongest and average temperatures reach 10 degrees Celsius.

Sheldon-Coulson said the cost of electricity is around 2 cents per kilowatt hour with a capacity factor above 90 percent. The steel structures carry zinc or aluminum coatings and are designed to last at least 15 years. Compute payloads will be swapped approximately every five years.

SpaceX plans to begin launching orbital data centers in 2028 at a cost of up to $90 million per launch. Shroepfer said placing hardware at sea costs roughly one-hundredth as much as placing it in orbit. Microsoft tested undersea data center units off Scotland before ending that research in 2024.