Assertion Supported AI assessment confidence: 90% certainty 4/5 debate potential 1/5

Panthalassa: Prototypes proved offshore compute, hydrogen production, and propulsion

Garth Sheldon-Coulson · Building inference data centers on the high seas · May 28, 2026 · at 45:55

Garth Sheldon-Coulson is the CEO of Panthalassa, a startup developing floating, wave-powered data centers for AI workloads.

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“We've put a series of full-scale prototypes in the water. So Ocean One which was back in 2019 no, sorry, 2021. Ocean Two, which was 2024, Wave Hopper, which was also 2024. So a series of prototypes that have proven Computing, hydrogen production, propulsion operating at sea for reasonably long periods of weeks.”

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More from Garth Sheldon-Coulson

Assertion Not checkable as stated
Panthalassa wave data centers achieve 99.8 percent availability with minimal batteries
“In all of our optimizations, we can be achieving for payloads, you know, we can be achieving with very little battery, like, 99.5, 99.8% power availability with far less battery than you would need for an equivalent solar installation, for example.”
Garth Sheldon-Coulson May 28, 2026 ▶ 18:45 Building inference data centers on the high seas
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Panthalassa designs deliver wave power at 3.5 to 4 cents per kWh
“We have designs that are two cent per kilowatt hour, On the power. And we, the optimum tends to be, you know, given everything I was just describing, the optimum tends to be in the four cent, three and a half to four cent per kilowatt hour range. But keep in m…”
Garth Sheldon-Coulson May 28, 2026 ▶ 25:09 Building inference data centers on the high seas
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Panthalassa expects lower AI chip failure rates at sea than on land
“In many cases, we believe that the reliability of the chips, the failure rates will actually be lower on our platform because we can provide much colder cooling temperatures than is typical on land, and we have no oxygen. We eliminate the oxygen from the paylo…”
Garth Sheldon-Coulson May 28, 2026 ▶ 40:16 Building inference data centers on the high seas
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Bulk of AI energy consumption will power long-running background processes
“There's a whole class of like super latency sensitive applications where you wouldn't want to use us. But that's not where the bulk of energy will be going. The bulk of energy will be going to very long running processes that are churning, churning, churning t…”
Garth Sheldon-Coulson May 28, 2026 ▶ 43:06 Building inference data centers on the high seas
Assertion Not checkable as stated
AI reinforcement learning energy demand probably already exceeds traditional pre-training
“And this is an area that is becoming huge in terms of energy demand. It'll, it will, The probably already is bigger than what we have historically considered training, you know, pre-training”
Garth Sheldon-Coulson May 28, 2026 ▶ 43:57 Building inference data centers on the high seas
Insight
Ocean convective cooling eliminates traditional data center cooling infrastructure costs for Panthalassa
“We are actually in a resource that gives us free, extremely good convective cooling, and that's huge, because it essentially lets you eliminate the entire cost structure of the data center. And our object is actually replacing both power plant and data center,…”
Garth Sheldon-Coulson May 28, 2026 ▶ 25:58 Building inference data centers on the high seas
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