Silicon Valley bets $140M on floating AI data centers powered by ocean waves

Silicon Valley bets on floating AI data centers powered by ocean waves

Silicon Valley investors such as Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel have bet hundreds of millions of dollars on deploying AI data centers powered by waves in the middle of the world's oceans -- a move that coincides with tech companies facing mounting challenges in building AI data center projects on land. The latest investment round of $140 million is intended to help the company Panthalassa complete a pilot manufacturing facility near Portland, Oregon, and speed up deployments of wave-riding "nodes" designed to generate electrical power, according to a May 4 press release. Instead of sending renewable energy to a land-based data center, the floating nodes would directly power onboard AI chips and transmit inference tokens representing the AI models' outputs to customers worldwide via satellite link. "Panthalassa's idea transforms an energy transmission problem into a data transmission problem," Benjamin Lee, a computer architect and engineer at the University of Pennsylvania, told Ars. "Performing AI computation on the ocean would require transferring models to the ocean-based nodes and then responding to prompts and queries." Each node resembles a huge steel sphere bobbing on the water with a tube-like structure extending vertically down beneath the surface. The wave motions drive water upward through the tube into a pressurized reservoir, where it can be released to spin a turbine generator that produces renewable energy for the AI chips on board. Panthalassa claims the node's AI chips would also get cooled using the surrounding water, which could offer another advantage over traditional data centers. "Ocean-based compute might offer a massive cooling advantage because the ambient temperature is so low," Lee said. "Land-based data centers use a lot of electricity and fresh water for cooling." The newest node prototype, called Ocean-3, is scheduled for testing in the northern Pacific Ocean later in 2026. The latest version reaches about 85 meters in length and would stand nearly as tall as London's Big Ben or New York City's Flatiron Building, according to the Financial Times. Panthalassa has already tested several earlier prototypes of the wave energy converter technology, including the Ocean-1 in 2021 and the Ocean-2 that underwent a three-week sea trial off the coast of Washington state in February 2024. The company's CEO and co-founder, Garth Sheldon-Coulson, said in a CBS interview that he hopes to eventually deploy thousands of the nodes. Challenges ahoy But there are plenty of challenges to overcome before Panthalassa can attempt to transform the world's oceans into AI computing resources. Relying on satellite links to transmit data between the nodes and customers means dealing with limited bandwidth and signal delays -- there is a reason why data centers still use fiber-optic cables to transmit large amounts of data quickly while reserving satellite links as backups. The limitations on satellite data transfers could also create complications if multiple nodes must coordinate to handle larger AI workloads. So it seems highly unlikely that such a scheme could replace traditional data centers, even if it might prove useful in some cases. "Satellites could communicate perhaps hundreds of megabits per second per terminal, which is feasible for real-time responses to prompts and queries," Lee told Ars. "But frequent communication and coordination between nodes may be challenging. And transferring larger volumes may require more time and physically transporting storage disks to the data center nodes by ship, but this should be done only periodically." Maintenance and replacement issues could also prove complex for nodes scattered across the world's oceans, Lee pointed out. Panthalassa wants to ensure the nodes are capable of "surviving for more than a decade in the harshest ocean conditions" while lasting "without human maintenance or intervention," according to recent company job listings that describe the node technology. The nodes are also supposed to be autonomous and self-propelled, although initial deployment would likely occur by ship. The idea of placing computing resources and data centers in the ocean has surfaced before in other projects. The most well-known example comes from Microsoft's Project Natick, which experimented with putting data center servers underwater in 2015 and 2018. Such underwater trials "showed that sealed, seawater-cooled systems could achieve lower failure rates than land-based systems," Lee said. Microsoft eventually decided against commercializing that vision, for now. But Chinese companies have gone ahead with deploying underwater data centers near Hainan Island and off the coast of Shanghai. There have also been several attempts to build floating data centers, with one of the most recent being the company Keppel starting construction of a floating data center for Singapore. The Panthalassa plan is more audacious than previous ocean-based efforts in many respects. But Silicon Valley's willingness to invest $210 million so far in such a vision is less surprising when considering how major US tech companies have committed to spending $765 billion on building AI data centers in 2026 -- and they are facing growing resistance from local communities along with construction delays associated with power supply constraints and labor shortages. Whatever the engineering and business challenges, floating AI computing nodes at least appear more feasible than Silicon Valley's other big bet on orbital data centers.

Can floating data centres meet AI's huge energy demand?

A US start-up is putting autonomous data centres in the ocean, powered by wave energy, but experts warn that the harsh environment could make maintenance challenging The data centres powering the AI boom already use more electricity than some small countries, and the International Energy Agency projects that their demand could reach 945 terawatt-hours a year - more than Japan's entire electricity consumption - by 2030. AI is so power-hungry that companies are exploring the idea of putting data centres in space, where they could draw on constant solar energy. But one start-up thinks the solution is here on Earth - just not on land. Panthalassa is building autonomous floating data centres that will put computing power out in the middle of the ocean. The Oregon-based company, which announced $140 million in funding last week, says its platforms could bypass overwhelmed electrical grids and deliver carbon-free computing in international waters. But beyond the technical and engineering challenges involved, it is unclear whether moving computing power offshore would actually ease data centres' biggest bottlenecks - doing so may just replace familiar problems with far more expensive ones. "Wave power is an old technology and it can work, but the ocean is a harsh environment," says Jonathan Koomey, a former researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California and an expert in data centre energy consumption. "The salt and the waves are effective at causing trouble for machinery." Shaped like a golf ball sitting on a tee, Panthalassa's floating data centres are 85 metres tall - about the height of Big Ben - and made of plate steel. They are hauled into the water by a boat, then self-propel to their designated locations. There, they generate their own electricity and run AI workloads without a grid connection, emissions or engines. The "tee" portion of the platform contains a long tube that is open at the bottom. As waves lift and drop the structure, sea water is pushed through the tube and up into the "ball" portion, which is hollow and mostly filled with air to make it float. The moving water spins turbines that generate electricity, which powers onboard graphics processing units, other computing hardware and satellite communications equipment. Ordinary data centres use vast amounts of water to cool their AI hardware. Since Panthalassa's servers are housed in sealed modules below the water surface, the container wall itself will act as a heat exchanger, with heat dissipating into the surrounding cold water. Ocean currents and mixing will disperse the waste heat, though potential effects on nearby marine ecosystems remain unclear. Panthalassa is attempting something few data centre operators have tried before: running critical computing infrastructure beyond the easy reach of human technicians. "Our data consistently names power and networking as the top two root causes of data centre outages," says Jacqueline Davis at the Uptime Institute, a global authority for data centre performance. "These can each be uniquely difficult to manage in a remote environment with little to no staff." Panthalassa didn't respond to New Scientist's questions before this article went to press. According to Davis, automation in data centre environments is largely limited to monitoring and analytics, with human physical intervention still being quite common, "especially in abnormal incidents, like when cooling compressors require manual restarts". This could prove to be one of Panthalassa's biggest challenges. Latency will be another. The data processed in the floating platforms will be transmitted back to users on land by Starlink satellites, which offer limited bandwidth and higher latency compared with fibre-optic cables. This makes the nodes most practical for AI workloads that receive a job, let it run for hours or days, then return the result - like training advanced models or running scientific simulations. But most AI applications used by consumers, like chatbots and search assistants, depend on fast response times and constant network communication. "Today's power constraints are landing most acutely on the large AI training data centres," says Davis. Panthalassa's approach will be more viable if the total power needs of running trained AIs grow enough to rival those of AI training, he says. Until that happens, floating data centres are likely to have a hard time competing with those on land. Although Panthalassa's technology is unique, its idea of moving data centres off land isn't. Aikido Technologies is developing floating data centres integrated into offshore wind platforms, and Mitsui O.S.K. is studying ship-based computing systems powered by marine energy sources. Earlier experiments, including Microsoft's underwater Project Natick, tested whether placing servers in or near water could improve cooling and efficiency. For now, though, offshore computing remains largely experimental. Beyond the engineering challenges, companies must still prove that ocean-based systems can compete economically with conventional data centres connected to power grids and fibre networks. "There are economies of scale to building data centres, which is why they are getting so large nowadays," says Koomey. "They build big ones to spread fixed costs over more compute. It's a lot harder and more risky to build big compute installations on the water than on land."

Peter Thiel backs $1bn ocean data centre start-up powered by waves

Peter Thiel is leading a $140mn investment in a US start-up that plans to use wave energy to fuel giant fleets of floating data centres, as Silicon Valley's search for AI power pushes into exotic new frontiers. Panthalassa, which has spent a decade developing its ocean energy technology, uses the bobbing motion of waves to force water through a turbine to produce electricity and power AI chips. Garth Sheldon-Coulson, co-founder and chief executive, told the FT the new money would allow the company to scale up a pilot manufacturing facility, with the aim of starting commercial deployments next year. The deal values Panthalassa at close to $1bn, including the new capital, according to a person familiar with the terms. Thiel, a co-founder of Palantir and PayPal, said: "The future demands more compute than we can imagine. Extraterrestrial solutions are no longer science fiction. Panthalassa has opened the ocean frontier." The company's "nodes" stand almost as tall as Big Ben in London or New York's Flatiron Building. Most of the 85-metre-long solid-steel structure sits below the surface, including a hermetically sealed container holding the AI server, cooled by seawater. The vessels can drive themselves to their destination, using the shape of their hull to propel themselves through the waves without an engine. As demand for AI computing capacity continues to outstrip supply, a growing number of long-shot efforts to ease the energy bottleneck are receiving funding, from rebooting mothballed nuclear power stations to launching solar-powered data centres into space. Sheldon-Coulson, who was previously an AI and energy researcher at hedge fund Bridgewater, believes wave and wind power are -- alongside solar and nuclear -- the only clean sources capable of generating "tens of terawatts" of energy. "Energy from open-ocean waves is low-cost, sustainable, abundant and now we have the technology to make it accessible for people," he said. Thiel has previously championed and invested in "seasteading", a libertarian project to launch seaborne communities in international waters, beyond the jurisdiction of any sovereign state. He is investing in Panthalassa through his personal fund. The VC firm he co-founded, Founders Fund, backed the company in a previous financing in 2018. Other new investors in this round include Salesforce.com chief executive Marc Benioff; PayPal and Affirm co-founder Max Levchin; and John Doerr, an early investor in Google, Amazon, Uber and Netscape, who hailed Panthalassa as a "game changer in addressing global energy needs and clean power generation". Panthalassa is staffed by former engineers from the likes of SpaceX, Boeing, Nasa, Tesla and Apple. Co-founder Brian Moffat previously worked at Disney's Imagineering unit and Google, while Dan Place, engineering director, worked on the "drone ship" SpaceX used to catch its reusable rockets. The system's AI chips receive and respond to users' queries via SpaceX's Starlink satellite connection. Sheldon-Coulson said Panthalassa's lollipop-shaped system can eventually produce much more energy than tidal or wind energy because it operates in remote areas and does not need to be tethered to the ocean floor or mainland. "One of the key insights that we had . . . was that it's very important to use the electricity in place," he said. "We will never be transmitting electricity back to shore. That makes us very different from all other ocean energy that's been tried in the past." Panthalassa's nodes are largely solid, with no hinges, flaps or gearboxes that might break down in hostile ocean conditions. It also makes it easier to manufacture at scale. The Oregon-based start-up plans to build its pilot manufacturing facility in the US but could move elsewhere depending on where it deploys larger fleets. Its system is "extremely rapid to manufacture" and uses only "earth-abundant materials" such as steel, Sheldon-Coulson said. "The supply chains are extremely robust for this particular energy technology. We think that's really important for scalability and environmental and ecological reasons." Panthalassa's nodes will first be towed out to sea horizontally behind a boat before flipping into a vertical position and travelling out into the open ocean by themselves. The company has not disclosed where it plans to deploy its fleet but it would be somewhere with the right wave conditions and remote enough to avoid shipping routes. The nodes, which recirculate the same water inside to power the generator, have no emissions or engines, minimising impact on sea life. "In our target regions . . . the waves are created by the wind and the wind is created by heat from the sun," Sheldon-Coulson said. "So waves are twice-concentrated sunlight and they keep going even when the wind stops. The waves are like a battery for sunlight and we can be capturing from it 24/7."

This startup just raised $140 million to build wave-powered AI data centers at sea

Serving tech enthusiasts for over 25 years. TechSpot means tech analysis and advice you can trust. Bottom line: Panthalassa wants to move a chunk of the AI infrastructure stack off land and into deep water, running neural network workloads on towers that live entirely on wave power and seawater cooling. The company has raised $140 million in Series B funding to move from prototypes into its first commercial hardware. It is effectively betting that open-ocean energy and offshore compute will scale faster than new land-based data centers. The basic concept is straightfoward: generate electricity from waves, use it on the spot, and run AI chips with no connection to the grid. Panthalassa builds autonomous platforms it calls nodes, tall steel structures that sit mostly below the surface and rise and fall with the motion of the sea. Inside, the vertical movement pushes water through an internal turbine, producing electricity in a closed loop. The company does not plan to send any of that power back to shore. Instead, the nodes carry their own compute stack in a sealed capsule, and the energy feeds those processors directly. Results from the AI workloads travel to land via satellite links such as Starlink, so the units operate as self-contained, offshore data centers. Panthalassa is doing that on purpose. "One of the key insights that we had . . . was that it's very important to use the electricity in place," chief executive and co-founder Garth Sheldon-Coulson told the Financial Times. "We will never be transmitting electricity back to shore. That makes us very different from all other ocean energy that's been tried in the past." The nodes are built to avoid the complexity that has tripped up earlier marine power systems. The structures are largely solid, with no hinges, flaps or gearboxes exposed to constant wave impact. Panthalassa argues that this design cuts maintenance risk and makes the units easier to manufacture at scale from standard steel plate. The design also recirculates the same internal water to drive the turbine, which the company says eliminates emissions and limits interaction with sea life. Rather than drawing on freshwater or building out large chiller plants, Panthalassa uses the surrounding ocean as a thermal sink to cool its servers. The company says that this setup not only helps keep temperatures in check but also extends hardware life, because the thermal profile is more stable than in many land-based sites. The company says it uses "earth-abundant materials" and existing steel supply chains so the nodes can be built quickly in coastal factories and shipped offshore. The nodes are assembled on land, towed out horizontally behind a boat and then flipped upright once they reach deep water. From there, they use their hull shape and the surrounding waves to make their way into the open ocean, rather than relying on engines. The company has tested earlier versions of the system - including its Ocean-1, Ocean-2 and Wavehopper prototypes - to dial in propulsion, autonomy, and energy generation in real conditions. Those trials fed into the current Ocean-3 series, which Panthalassa plans to deploy in the northern Pacific starting in 2026, with broader commercial rollout expected in 2027. Panthalassa is using the new capital to complete a pilot manufacturing facility near Portland, Oregon, where it plans to build the first batch of large-scale nodes. The investor list includes Peter Thiel, who led the round through his personal fund, along with Marc Benioff's TIME Ventures, Max Levchin's SciFi Ventures and John Doerr, among others. Sheldon-Coulson, a former AI and energy researcher, argues that wave and wind in the open ocean, alongside solar and nuclear, are among the few clean resources that can reach "tens of terawatts" of generation as AI workloads multiply. He describes waves as a form of stored solar energy. "In our target regions . . . the waves are created by the wind and the wind is created by heat from the sun," he said. "So waves are twice-concentrated sunlight and they keep going even when the wind stops. The waves are like a battery for sunlight and we can be capturing from it 24/7." For now, Panthalassa's bet is that this "battery" can support a new class of distributed data centers that never touch the grid at all.

Data centers at sea: Oregon's Panthalassa nets $140M led by Peter Thiel for wave-powered AI

Wave energy had largely been bobbing around in the background of the U.S. clean energy sector -- until now. On Monday, Oregon-based Panthalassa announced a $140 million round led by Peter Thiel. The new funding from the PayPal co-founder and others will allow the startup to finish building its pilot manufacturing facility near Portland. Panthalassa is developing technology that pairs wave power generated by massive floating orbs with onsite AI computing. The systems transmit data via low-Earth-orbit satellites. "We've built a technology platform that operates in the planet's most energy-dense wave regions, far from shore, and turns that resource into reliable clean power," said Garth Sheldon-Coulson, Panthalassa's co-founder and CEO, in a statement. "We're now ready to build factories, deploy fleets, and provide a sustainable new source of energy for humanity." The planet is scrambling to find new energy sources to meet demand from data centers and electrified transportation, building heating and cooling, and industrial applications. One of the biggest challenges historically with wave power is the need to build costly infrastructure to move energy from the ocean to where it's needed. Panthalassa's approach sidesteps that problem by using power onsite to run already-trained AI models, while tapping cold ocean water to cool the hardware -- solving two problems at once. The strategy shares parallels with surging interest in space-based data centers that harness solar energy. In March, Starcloud, a Redmond, Wash.-based startup, announced $170 million in new funding, vaulting it to unicorn status with a $1.1 billion valuation. "The future demands more compute than we can imagine," said Peter Thiel. "Extra-terrestrial solutions are no longer science fiction. Panthalassa has opened the ocean frontier." Founded in 2016 as a public benefit corporation, Panthalassa has spent nearly a decade developing power generation, propulsion, autonomous operations and computing technology. That work has included prototypes -- Ocean-1, Ocean-2 and Wavehopper -- deployed in sea trials in 2021 and 2024. The company is now preparing to deploy its Ocean-3 pilot series this year, with commercial systems planned for 2027. Sheldon-Coulson previously served as a senior investment associate at Bridgewater Associates. Chief Innovation Officer Brian Moffat, listed as a co-founder by Lowercarbon Capital, developed a novel wave energy system for Spindrift Energy before launching Panthalassa. The company has approximately 108 employees, according to PitchBook. Other Pacific Northwest companies pursuing wave energy include Seattle's Oscilla Power and Oregon State University spinout C-Power. Wave energy startups that have exceeded $100 million in investment globally include Sweden's CorPower Ocean and the United Kingdom's Marine Power Systems. The Series B round included participation from new investors John Doerr, Marc Benioff's TIME Ventures, Max Levchin's SciFi Ventures, Susquehanna Sustainable Investments, Hanwha Group, Anthony Pratt, Fortescue Ventures, Future Positive, WTI, Nimble Partners, Super Micro Computer, Sozo Ventures, Dylan Field, Planetary VC, Leblon Capital, Resilience Reserve, Portland Seed Fund, and the Intrepid Oregon Fund. Returning investors include Founders Fund, Gigascale Capital, Lowercarbon Capital, Unless and WovenEarth. Panthalassa previously raised $78 million, according to PitchBook.

Using the ocean to power data centers

There are two global problems you probably don't like to think about. First, burning gas and coal is still heating up the planet. Second, the thousands of AI data centers popping up all over the country consume enormous amounts of power, which produces even more carbon pollution - and drives up our electric bills. And as Garth Sheldon-Coulson says, this is not going to stop. "We're still at the beginning of this demand," he said. Sheldon-Coulson, the CEO and co-founder of Panthalassa, in Vancouver, Wash., hopes to address both problems at once with wave energy. "The ocean is really unlimited in terms of how much energy is available," he said. "It will really be the cheapest energy on the planet." He likened Panthalassa's test model, the Ocean-2, to a floating hydroelectric dam. "As it goes up and down with the waves, it causes water that's in that tube to be forced up into the top. Once it's in the ball, the water is forced through a turbine. The turbine spins, and that's what makes the electricity." Using a model of Panthalassa's latest design, the Ocean-3, Sheldon-Coulson explained the most surprising part: there's no anchor - and no cables. It's a self-propelled system that is not tethered to the ocean floor. "It's like a little Roomba, except it's enormous," he said. There's no cable to bring power back to shore, either. In essence, these are floating data centers. They generate power from the waves; process AI computing tasks on the spot; and send us the answers by satellite. "When you deploy many of our systems, they work together basically as a data center," Sheldon-Coulson said. "So, we think of it as a really good alternative to data centers on land." Panthalassa has all of the private funding it needs, because it offers AI companies a quicker, cleaner way to get power than building data centers on land. Construction of the Ocean-3s is well under way. Sheldon-Coulson expects them to be operating off-shore by around August of this year. Their advantages? "Clean, no fuel, no land use, no getting in the way of other activities on land, and very fast to scale," he said. Eventually, the company hopes to deploy thousands of them, far out at sea. "It is really exciting that we're working on something that is coming along right at the right time, in a way that's much cleaner, much more sustainable, and quite scalable, so that we can really meet that demand as it comes," Sheldon-Coulson said. For more info:

Forget Space Data Centers, This Peter Thiel-Backed Start Up Raised Millions To Fuel Ocean-Powered Compute

A Peter Thiel-backed startup, Panthalassa, has secured $140 million in a funding round aimed at propelling its AI-powered sea technology. Led by Thiel, the funding round witnessed participation from a mix of new and returning investors such as John Doerr, Marc Benioff's TIME Ventures, Max Levchin's SciFi Ventures, and Founders Fund. The funds will be channeled towards the completion of Panthalassa's pilot manufacturing facility near Portland. Founded in 2016, Panthalassa is working on a technology that merges wave power generated by floating orbs with onsite AI computing. The systems transmit data via low-Earth-orbit satellites. The Oregon-based startup has spent nearly a decade developing technologies in power generation, propulsion, autonomous operations, and computing. Its co-founder and CEO, Garth Sheldon-Coulson, said that the company has developed offshore technology to harness high-energy waves into reliable, clean power, with Ocean-3 pilots launching this year and commercial rollout planned for 2027. Meanwhile, Thiel said, "Extra-terrestrial solutions are no longer science fiction. Panthalassa has opened the ocean frontier." AI Race Shifts Beyond Land Limits Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by a Benzinga editor. Image via Shutterstock Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs To add Benzinga News as your preferred source on Google, click here.

Inside the giant floating ocean balls Silicon Valley is betting $200M on

Tech investors are pouring more than $200 million into a futuristic plan to build floating AI data centers powered by ocean waves -- a wild new approach aimed at dodging the growing headaches of building massive server farms on land, according to Ars Technica. Startup Panthalassa is behind the project, and is enjoying huge backing from billionaire investor and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, who helped lead the company's latest $140 million funding round to build a pilot manufacturing facility near Portland, Oregon. The funds will accelerate development of giant wave-powered "nodes" that float in the middle of the ocean while running AI systems, according to the Financial Times. Instead of piping renewable energy back to land, the company wants the floating structures to generate electricity on-site and directly power AI chips onboard. The AI systems would then send results back to customers around the world through satellite connections. "Panthalassa's idea transforms an energy transmission problem into a data transmission problem," University of Pennsylvania computer architect Benjamin Lee told Ars Technica. The floating nodes resemble enormous steel spheres bobbing in the ocean with a long vertical tube stretching beneath the surface. As waves move the structure, water is pushed upward into a pressurized chamber that can then release water through turbines to generate electricity. The surrounding ocean water would also naturally cool the AI chips -- a potentially massive advantage as traditional AI data centers burn through huge amounts of power and water to stay cool. "Ocean-based compute might offer a massive cooling advantage because the ambient temperature is so low," Lee told the outlet. Panthalassa's latest prototype, called Ocean-3, is expected to begin testing in the northern Pacific later this year, according to the report. Ars Technica reports the structure stretches roughly 85 meters long -- nearly as tall as London's Big Ben or the Flatiron Building in New York City. The company has already tested earlier versions of the technology, including a prototype that completed a three-week sea trial off the coast of Washington state in 2024. CEO and co-founder Garth Sheldon-Coulson previously told CBS he hopes to eventually deploy thousands of the floating nodes. But the ambitious concept faces major hurdles. Satellite internet connections remain far slower and less reliable than fiber-optic cables used by traditional land-based data centers, which could create problems for AI systems that require constant communication between servers. "Frequent communication and coordination between nodes may be challenging," Lee told Ars Technica. Maintenance could also become a nightmare if thousand of autonomous AI-powered machines are scattered across the world's oceans for years at a time. According to a recent company jobs listings, Panthalassa wants the floating nodes to survive "more than a decade in the harshest ocean conditions" while operating without human maintenance. The futuristic project also sparked skepticism online after the Financial Times reported that the floating vessels could propel themselves through waves without engines. Meanwhile others pointed out another advantage, including the Wall Street Journal's deputy tech and media editor based in San Francisco Jeff Bercovici, who joked that the floating data centers may have accidentally solved a much bigger economic problem -- shipping. "If ocean travel doesn't require propulsion anymore we've solved a bigger problem than data centers," he wrote on X. The concept of ocean-based data centers isn't entirely new. Microsoft experimented with underwater data center servers through its Project Natick initiative in 2015 and 2018 before ultimately shelving the idea. Chinese companies have also deployed underwater data centers near Hainan Island and Shanghai, while Singapore-based Keppel has worked on floating data centers projects, according to the report. Ars Technica noted that Panthalassa's vision is among the most aggressive yet, and it comes as major tech players are expected to spend an eye-watering $765 billion on AI data centers in 2026 while facing increasing resistance from local communities, labor shortages and power supply constraints on land.