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The rise of artificial intelligence is devouring the capacity of electrical grids around the world, skyrocketing consumption and carbon emissions. And this is just the beginning. As Garth Sheldon-Coulson, CEO of the startup Panthalassa, warned, in an interview with CBS News: “We are still at the beginning of this lawsuit.” To solve this bottleneck, the heaviest investors in the technology sector are looking to the sea. Peter Thiel, the controversial billionaire co-founder of Palantir and PayPal, just led a $140 million injection into Panthalassa. But what exactly is Panthalassa? To understand it, you have to erase the traditional image of an industrial warehouse full of servers. Sheldon-Coulson described it with a rather peculiar metaphor: “It’s like ‘a giant Roomba,’ an autonomous, self-propelled system that sails without anchors across the Pacific.” The anatomy of a marine colossus. Panthalassa will use this newly raised $140 million to complete its pilot plant in Oregon and accelerate the deployment of its new model, the Ocean-3which will be tested in the North Pacific in 2026 with a view to commercialization in 2027, as detailed ESG Today. We are not talking about small buoys. The proportions are colossal. As explained Financial Timesthese solid steel structures measure about 85 meters long. To give us an idea, they are almost as tall as the iconic Big Ben of London or the building Flatiron from New York. In Xataka There is a company that has grown 3,000% in the stock market, even beating the performance of Nvidia: Sandisk The engineering behind. Just as described Tom’s Hardwarethe nodes are shaped like a “lollipop”: a huge white sphere floats on the surface, while a long tubular structure submerges vertically under the water. As the waves pass, the structure rises and falls. This relative motion forces seawater up the pressurized tube into the spherical chamber, where it spins a turbine. Being a continuous cycle powered by an ocean that never stops, the system generates electricity 24 hours a day. But this is where the real twist of the project lies. Historically, the big problem with wave energy has been the enormous cost of laying underwater cables to bring electricity to the coast. According to GeekWirePanthalassa solves this in one fell swoop: it doesn’t send power to shore, but uses it directly on board to power the AI ​​chips. Once the information is processed, the results (inference tokens) are sent back to clients on the ground via low-orbit satellite connections, such as SpaceX’s Starlink network. The end of terrestrial bottlenecks. This approach represents a radical paradigm shift in technological infrastructure. “Panthalassa’s idea transforms a power transmission problem into a data transmission problem,” explains to Ars Technica Benjamin Lee, computer engineer and architect at the University of Pennsylvania. In addition to inexhaustible energy, the ocean offers another vital advantage: cold. Traditional data centers spend fortunes and consume millions of liters of drinking water just to prevent servers from melting due to heat. On the high seas, the story is different. As detailed BusinessWirethe ocean provides “free supercooling,” solving one of the industry’s biggest engineering challenges and extending the life of chips. Added to this is the growing citizen resistance. As pointed out Tom’s Hardwarelocal communities are increasingly rejecting the construction of these huge land-based industrial warehouses due to noise, land grabbing and energy diversion. On the ocean, there are simply no neighbors to bother or urban planning plans to navigate. Besides, as highlighted Finance TimesBeing a closed water circuit without external engines or emissions, the impact on marine life is minimal, underpinning its ecological appeal. The challenge of taming the ocean. As revolutionary as the idea may sound, transforming the ocean into a global supercomputer has titanic obstacles: The connectivity bottleneck. As he warns Ars Technicarelying on satellites is fine for “inference” (i.e. returning real-time responses to ChatGPT users or similar), but satellites have limited bandwidth and latency. If multiple ocean nodes are required to coordinate to train a heavy AI model, satellite connectivity simply won’t measure up against traditional fiber optic cables. The fury of the sea. Data Center Dynamics emphasizes that these nodes They will have to survive extreme conditions: hurricanes, corrosive saltpeter and perpetual motion for more than a decade without human intervention or maintenance. They are not alone in the idea of ​​​​wetting the servers. According to Ars Technica, Microsoft has already tested submerging data centers in the seabed with its Project Natickand Chinese companies already operate underwater infrastructure near Hainan Island. However, Panthalassa is much bolder: being floating, autonomous nodes without grounded cables, they completely break the umbilical cord with the continental electrical grid. {“videoId”:”x9sjece”,”autoplay”:false,”title”:”CHINA is WINNING the TECH WAR because they planned it that way 10 YEARS AGO”, “tag”:”china”, “duration”:”721″} A bet at the height of desperation. Despite investor optimism, transforming the Pacific into the next computing cloud will not be a cake walk. $210 million (the company’s total funding to date) may seem like an outrageous amount to throw servers into the sea, but it needs to be put into perspective. As highlighted Ars Technicathis figure is anecdotal if we consider that large American technology companies plan to spend $765 billion building terrestrial data centers in 2026 alone. Faced with the desperation of the sector – which has been exploring since reopen abandoned nuclear power plants until setting up servers powered by solar panels in space orbit—the option of floating in the ocean seems reasonable. The ultimate goal of Panthalassa, as shared by its CEOis to deploy thousands of these nodes far from the coasts. If they can tame the waves and satellite bottlenecks, they could have found the Holy Grail of AI: “The cheapest energy on the planet, infinite, clean and beyond the reach of Earth’s bureaucracy.” Image | Panthalassa Xataka | Old chips never die: companies that made “boring” chips are riding the dollar (function() { window._JS_MODULES = window._JS_MODULES || {}; var headElement = document.getElementsByTagName(‘head’)(0); if (_JS_MODULES.instagram) { var instagramScript = document.createElement(‘script’); instagramScript.src=”https://platform.instagram.com/en_US/embeds.js”; instagramScript.async = true; instagramScript.defer = true; headElement.appendChild(instagramScript); – The news They … Read more