Does this stealthy startup hold the key to keeping data centers out of your neighborhood?

An idea born out of a four-hour session at a Chick-fil-A may have the ability to both cheapen energy costs and solve data center production solutions.

With land-grabs and land offers from Big Tech routinely popping up in the news cycle, citizens are concerned with how America’s heartland could fall into the hands of tech companies that replace farming plots with gigantic rooms of computers.

One company is asking why it can’t just put those in the ocean.

‘Our goal is to make terawatts.’

Garth Sheldon-Coulson, co-founder and CEO of Panthalassa, said that he has been operating his ocean nodes in semi-secret for about 10 years.

At about 66 feet wide and 260 feet tall, his company’s floating nodes bob up and down with the ocean waves and create energy from the water that flows through them. The water is funneled through channels inside the nodes to create a pressurized system that spins turbines that connect to a generator and produce electricity.

The object can move and steer on its own once in the water and is capable of traveling about 30 miles per day to ideal spots where the winds are most intense and thus create the most waves.

Sheldon-Coulson told the Core Memory Podcast that each unit has an approximate cost of about $1 million and that while it is expensive now, the path to scaling could come in a couple of different ways.

First, the energy production could be stored and brought back to shore, likely packaged as cheaper, cleaner energy. Panthalassa said it can produce electricity at about 2.5 cents per kilowatt hour, which is allegedly below the cost of solar energy and even natural gas in some jurisdictions.

However, a faster track to success may be through the combination of floating data centers and satellite internet.

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– YouTube

The CEO said that his company is looking at the idea of putting processing units aboard its nodes, using the generated electricity to power them and of course the ocean water to cool them. Cooling is currently an expensive and integral process of shored AI data centers.

The data processed in the ocean would then be digitally shipped off via satellite services like Starlink. Impressively, Panthalassa was founded before Starlink, meaning the company put at least some of its eggs into a basket that didn’t quite exist yet.

When asked about the AI data transfer and the speed at which it could actually travel by satellite (as opposed to fiber optics), Sheldon-Coulson noted that the speed of the input and output comes in very small quantities — text that is the size of kilobytes. It is actually the processing that takes up the time — which would theoretically take place aboard his ocean nodes — not the question taken in or the answer provided by a chatbot, for example.

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– YouTube

“Our goal is to make terawatts,” states the Panthalassa company’s video. “The entire global electricity supply right now is about three and a half terawatts. We think we can do a significant fraction of that.”

The company has raised over $78 million in investment to date and has pointed to areas in the Southern Hemisphere as ideal spots for the nodes due to high wind speeds.

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