I have always been drawn to the ocean because it is a home to the strikingly sublime— creatures larger and stranger than anything the human mind would think to design, shapes and behaviors that feel imported from some other planet’s biology. I never expected a piece of human-made infrastructure to compete.
But this weekend, like many people who track American deep tech, I found myself staring at images of Panthalassa’s Ocean-2 after CEO Garth Sheldon-Coulson gave his first extended interview on Ashlee Vance’s Core Memory. Panthalassa is a Portland, Oregon-based startup building floating, self-propelled wave energy converters that double as data centers; each of these “nodes” generates electricity from the ocean’s motion, runs AI workloads onboard, and sends the results to shore via satellite. Although tidal energy plays have come and gone, Panthalassa isn’t harvesting tidal energy near shore. Rather, the nodes are designed to operate hundreds of miles from any coast, in the deep open ocean, where wave energy is orders of magnitude more abundant and consistent. Waves in the southern Pacific, particularly in the latitudes sailors have called the roaring forties and furious fifties for centuries, run essentially without interruption, driven by winds that circle the globe with no landmass in the way or continental shelf to dissipate the energy.
The Ocean-2 is their full-scale prototype, and it is the most arresting object I have seen in a long time. A swollen metallic orb perched on a long, tapering stalk, bobbing alone in open water with no dock, no mooring, or visible tether to anything human. It looks as if a space-age era Soviet probe missed its trajectory, punched through the atmosphere, and settled into the Pacific instead—a kind of Sputnik of the Sea.
