Ramez Naam liked the founders’ idea enough to regret turning it down. Their early pitch was to put computers on wave-powered ocean buoys, initially for Bitcoin mining. He was not sure he cared enough about that use to invest.
Five years later, he had bought in twice at much higher valuations. “I'm an idiot because I said no to these guys five years ago,” he said on Moonshots with Peter Diamandis.
The company is Panthalassa, and Naam’s enthusiasm comes with a financial interest: it is now a portfolio company of his. Its proposal combines three things available far offshore—wave energy, cold seawater and satellite communications—to produce AI computing rather than send electricity back to land.
Send answers ashore, not electricity
Offshore power has a delivery problem: electricity generated far from customers needs a way to reach them. Panthalassa’s answer, described in its May 4, 2026 funding announcement, is to use the power where it is made.
Each proposed autonomous steel unit generates electricity from waves and consumes it locally for AI inference—the work of producing answers from an already-trained model. Results travel through low-Earth-orbit satellites rather than electricity travelling through a subsea cable. What goes ashore is data, not current.
That changes where the company can look for energy. It does not need to choose a site primarily for its proximity to electricity customers or a cable connection to the grid.
Naam sketched the machine itself. A sphere sits at the surface, while a cone about 80 metres long extends into the sea, open at the bottom. As the structure bobs downward on the swell, water moves up inside it and drives a turbine. Shaped channels, he explained, are intended to turn that repeated wave motion into nearly continuous generation.
Following the waves
Naam’s geographical vision reaches well beyond the coast. He pointed to the Southern Ocean around Antarctica as the location of the strongest waves, and described the team’s starting question: what could they build if they went where the waves were bigger?
Stronger, more consistent waves could let a generator produce more electricity relative to its maximum possible output—a measure called its capacity factor. More output from the same hardware would help bring down the cost of each unit of electricity.
Naam put the eventual target at roughly two cents per kilowatt-hour. “That's their target. It will take some scaling to get there,” he said. He expects the route to lower costs to run through factories: modular units, manufactured repeatedly at volume, with improvements carried into subsequent production.
The figure is a prospective electricity cost, not a measured commercial result or a price for delivering AI answers. The computing hardware and satellite connection still have work to do after the waves have generated power.
The ocean as a heat sink
The second attraction is cooling. AI processors turn much of the electricity they consume into heat, which must be removed to keep them operating.
Naam drew a brief contrast with computers in orbit. SpaceX’s June 2026 prospectus describes an orbital computing design using radiators, vapour chambers and active cooling loops. Heat must be carried away from the chips and radiated into space.
At sea, Naam described a more direct path: a heat sink conducts heat from a GPU, the processor doing the AI work, to the device’s steel walls. Cold seawater outside absorbs it. In the conditions he described, that water is around 40°F, or a little above 4°C.
He also sees the possibility of fewer GPU failures and longer operating lives with this cooling arrangement. That is part of his investment case, rather than an established commercial reliability advantage. The devices have “their own set of technical challenges,” he acknowledged, before returning to what attracts him: modular hardware that can be built in factories.
Northern-Pacific pilots come first
The Southern Ocean is Naam’s vision of where abundant waves could take the technology. Panthalassa’s announced next deployments are elsewhere.
In its May 4 announcement, the company reported a $140 million Series B led by Peter Thiel, with Planetary VC among the participants. It said the money would help complete an Oregon pilot factory and accelerate deployments. It also described Ocean-1, Ocean-2 and Wavehopper prototype deployments in 2021 and 2024.
On the podcast, Naam said three units were in the ocean and a fourth would launch soon. The company’s published timetable called for Ocean-3 pilots in the northern Pacific during 2026, ahead of planned commercial deployments in 2027. Those pilots—not a commercial fleet around Antarctica—are the next announced step toward the factory-built ocean computers he once declined to back.