The Very Wild, Very Real Plan To Build AI Data Centers In The Ocean - EP 65 Garth Sheldon-Coulson

**Garth Sheldon-Coulson** (0:00)
If we go super fast and follow the plan that we're on with manufacturing, that will be by far the fastest progression from conceptualization to gigawatt of deployment of any energy technology in history, including gas turbines, including solar took 50 years to do that, including nuclear, anything. And that's driven by the fact that it is so darn simple.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:33)
Welcome to the Core Memory Podcast. This is Ashlee Vance. We have a guest on today who I think you guys are gonna, your mind is gonna expand and be blown away a little bit.
Garth Sheldon-Coulson, thank you for joining us.

**Garth Sheldon-Coulson** (0:50)
My pleasure.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:51)
You are the co-founder and CEO of Panthalassa. Tell me how you say it.

**Garth Sheldon-Coulson** (0:58)
Some people say Panthalassa, some people say Panthalassa.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:00)
Okay, okay.
It's an amazing company name. We're definitely going to talk about the origins of it. I'm gonna briefly take a crack at pointing us in the right direction and then we'll dive in on all the details. But so you guys are broadly in the getting energy from the ocean business. You've been around for about 10 years.

**Garth Sheldon-Coulson** (1:23)
We started 10 years ago.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:25)
Okay, a bunch of SpaceX, Blue Origin style, hard tech people have been up in Portland, beavering away for 10 years in relative secrecy. I mean, there is some stuff out on the internet and you guys put out this great video and people can find tidbits about what you do, but you haven't really gone into gory detail, I think it's fair to say, about the vision.

**Garth Sheldon-Coulson** (1:49)
That's right. Quasi-stealth.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:50)
Yeah, quasi-stealth. And so yeah, well, let's get into it. I think we first talked, I want to say, it was like three years ago or something. And I heard somebody told me there was this incredible company up in the Pacific Northwest that would be right up my alley, and it definitely is.
I mean, why don't you describe the basics of this machine?

**Garth Sheldon-Coulson** (2:13)
Maybe the place to start is like, we're not just trying to build a machine, the machine is part of it.
But really, it's a system that we're trying to build. And what the system does is capture energy from the middle of the ocean.
And so you need as part of that, a machine that's really good at capturing energy. But you need a whole ecosystem of other things too, to build those machines and send them out. You need things in some of our deployment models to bring the energy home, or in others of our deployment models, we have computers living on the systems. So there's a whole ecosystem with the goal of really unlocking this new energy resource for humanity. And what is that new energy resource? It's the ocean, far from shore. So this thing that we have, you know, giant 70% of the planet, contains enormous energy in the form of waves, in the form of the winds that are blowing over it. And yeah, so we're building the system to go and harness that for the first time.

**Ashlee Vance** (3:12)
Yeah. And so these things, what do you call the object itself?

**Garth Sheldon-Coulson** (3:17)
The object is a node.

**Ashlee Vance** (3:18)
A node.
So these nodes are out in the deep ocean, where the waves are quite large, and they're getting the energy from the waves, from that motion where nobody's harvesting this or making use of it today. And you have this system of the water rushing in and out of these nodes, and then there's a turbine on the inside that's getting sputtered out. We're going to go into deeper detail on this. And then, so you're producing energy, and then you have two options. Either you take that energy and bring it back to shore, or you do something interesting right at the node. Is that the basics?

**Garth Sheldon-Coulson** (3:56)
That's exactly it.

**Ashlee Vance** (3:57)
Yeah, okay. And then, so for the last 10 years or so, you've been working on building these nodes, and I'm sure you start out with a relatively small one and get bigger and bigger. What is the, just to give people a picture in their head, the first ones that you hope to commercialize, what size would these, can you paint an image of this machine?

**Garth Sheldon-Coulson** (4:22)
Yeah, yeah. So the machine, so the machine is designed to capture the energy in a way that uses as few moving parts as possible.
People have looked at waves coming onto shore in the past and said like, oh, it would be great if we could capture that. So they've built systems on shore that have like flappers or maybe things that are slightly offshore that have articulating members and the history of those efforts is not spectacular.