Peter Thiel Invests $140M Into Panthalassa: Here's What the $1B Valued Startup Is About

On Monday, May 4, Oregon startup Panthalassa announced it raised $140 million in Series B funding led by Peter Thiel, the PayPal and Palantir co-founder known for early investments in Facebook and his contrarian tech bets. The deal values the company at close to $1 billion, according to a person familiar with the terms reported by the Financial Times.

The new money will finish building a pilot manufacturing facility near Portland and get the first ocean units deployed next year. Panthalassa has spent a decade developing technology to power artificial intelligence by putting floating platforms, a giant steel structure, in the ocean that run entirely on wave energy, with no connection to land-based power grids.

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What Panthalassa Actually Builds

The company calls its floating platforms "nodes." Each one is 85 meters long, made of solid steel, with most of the structure sitting below the ocean surface.

The nodes work by forcing water through a turbine as they bob up and down with the waves. That generates electricity, which powers AI chips sealed inside a protected container. The surrounding ocean water cools the hardware. The platforms drive themselves to their destination using the shape of their hull to move through waves without an engine.