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

Silicon Valley’s AI boom may be heading out to sea.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 ...