Among big future businesses Elon Musk is selling investors in newly public SpaceX is his plan to put data centers in space: solar-powered satellites, spread across a vast network, processing information in space and beaming it back to Earth. As pitches go, it has the clean geometry of a Musk bull case. It’s the kind of “I want to die on Mars, just not on impact” sci-fi idea the newly minted trillionaire is famous for. And it’s particularly well timed: the AI feeding frenzy is in overdrive, but the terrestrial data centers they require are becoming an unwanted menace in many communities, raising utility rates, creating noise and pollution, and generating few local economic benefits.

SpaceX hopes to begin launching orbital data centers in 2028, though its IPO filing gives no cost estimates for such a system. It does, however, include the kind of caveat that sits in a securities filing like a flare on the runway: The plan involves “significant technical complexity, unproven technologies, or technologies that do not exist or may require significant advancement, and such initiatives may not achieve commercial viability.”

SpaceX lawyers meant it as a warning. Musk could probably plaster it on the lobby wall.

But if the goal is simply to move data centers off land and run them at lower cost, there’s a far better option: the ocean. It’s far away from taxpayers, zoning fights and the sudden arrival of hyperscale neighbors. And it may be a climate-friendly source of power and a cheap way to cool massive data centers.

“What we’re doing is totally crazy”

“What we’re doing is totally crazy”

This is where Panthalassa wants to go. The Portland, Oregon startup, backed by Peter Thiel and a raft of Silicon Valley venture firms, has spent the past decade developing floating data centers that generate their own electricity from open-ocean waves and cool themselves with cold seawater. It expects commercial units to be operational in 2027, a year before SpaceX says it may begin putting compute satellites in orbit, with all those securities filing caveats.

“What we’re doing is totally crazy,” CEO and cofounder Garth Sheldon-Coulson told Forbes. “We're the first company that’s going to the middle of the ocean to do this.”

The Ocean-2 prototype node that Panthalassa (Greek for “all sea”) has been testing off the coast of Washington state since last year looks less like a data center than a marine-industrial lollipop: a 70-meter steel tower submerged below........

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