An Oregon startup that’s raised more than $300 million this year to use wave power to generate energy for artificial intelligence hubs unveiled the Southwest Washington factory Friday, where it aims to build nodes to power this new kind of renewable energy.
Panthalassa — the company takes its name from the super ocean that took up most of the surface of the planet Earth 190 million years ago — hopes to seed deep oceans around the globe with self-driving buoys and then use that energy to power floating AI computation hubs. The hubs wouldn’t come with the same baggage — carbon emissions, fresh water contamination and neighborhood disruption — that have brought about a backlash against data centers on land.
A crowd gathered to view the Panthalassa factory floor after a ribbon cutting ceremony on Nov. 6, 2026, in Vancouver, Wash.
Jenny Kane / OPB
The investment marks the Portland-based company’s first attempt at moving from custom manufacturing to an assembly line, but while a significant investment in the region, it’s also a test of its theory that it will eventually be able to make and deploy its “nodes” at additional factories around the globe.
Investors and scientists have touted ocean energy as a potential renewable energy source for years, but it’s yet to yield profits on any large scale. Oregon State University operates an $80 million wave energy hub near Newport. And at least a dozen businesses around the globe are racing Panthalassa to prove out the business case — each with a different approach. Some are anchored near the shore. Many want to connect directly to electrical grids. Panthalassa says its un-anchored deep ocean nodes, which use the power they generate instead of distributing it on the grid, set its model apart.
“It turns out that there’s a lot of energy in the middle of the ocean. So we said to ourselves, what would it take? What could we do to build a technology that captured that energy cheaply, reliably, that could transit out into the resource on its own?” said CEO Garth Sheldon-Coulson in an interview with OPB on Friday in Vancouver, where the company started fabricating prototypes in 2022.
Garth Sheldon-Coulson, co-founder and CEO of Panthalassa, speaks before a ribbon cutting ceremony at a Panthalassa factory on Nov. 6, 2026, in Vancouver, Wash.
Jenny Kane / OPB
Panthalassa’s nodes, which float hundreds of miles from shore, look like enormous white orbs, larger than a sailboat, covered in ladders and portals. But like icebergs, much more lies beneath the surface — each node sits atop a hollow tube that lifts seawater into its power-generating turbines. The full assembly can be six stories high, although most is below the water.
“The technology that we’ve created, you can call it different things,” Sheldon-Coulson said. “Some people call it advanced wave energy. Some people call it open ocean wave energy. Some people call it ocean hydro because it works like a hydroelectric dam. But whatever you call it, it will be the cheapest green electrons on the planet.”
It may sound like a bombastic promise, but tests of prototypes have been successful enough to woo big investors and political support in both Oregon and Washington.
Peter Thiel, a high-profile Republican billionaire venture capitalist and AI evangelist, recruited other tech industry leaders to help Panthalassa raise $140 million this spring. The company sought another $225 million from venture capital groups this summer. Now, according to industry press, the company is valued at close to $2 billion.
Now, some of that money is helping the company move from building one node at a time to manufacturing them on an assembly line in Vancouver.
Garth Sheldon-Coulson, co-founder and CEO of Panthalassa, holds a small-scale model of one of the company’s nodes, after a ribbon cutting ceremony at a Panthalassa factory on Nov. 6, 2026, in Vancouver, Wash.
Jenny Kane / OPB
On Friday, Panthalassa unveiled the factory it developed to do just that, a vast open warehouse near the Columbia River that was part of the Kaiser Shipyard, which built more than 140 ships to support the U.S. effort in World War II.
When fully staffed, about 50 people will work there, rolling plate steel into shape and using robotic welding technology to construct nodes that can be shipped down the Columbia and deployed deep in the ocean.
The ultimate goal is to develop a blueprint that Panthalassa can use to create factories for its nodes around the globe.
“The first step towards a fleet begins here,” said Dana Hartsig, Panthalassa’s vice president of manufacturing.