South Korean internet giant Naver has taken an undisclosed stake in Panthalassa, a Portland, Oregon startup building wave-powered floating AI data centers, as Seoul's largest cloud operator hunts for unconventional compute capacity to meet surging AI demand.
A data center that floats
Panthalassa's "Node" platforms fuse three problems into one machine: wave-driven power generation, seawater cooling for hermetically sealed AI compute containers, and Starlink-based satellite links that beam user queries offshore and back. The setup skips both grid interconnection queues and the land constraints that have throttled hyperscale campuses. Ocean-1 and Ocean-2 prototypes have already been tested off the US Pacific Northwest coast, with the pilot-series Ocean-3 slated for at-sea deployment later this year ahead of commercial nodes in 2027.
Naver's compute triangle
"Naver is rapidly securing differentiated data center infrastructure through global partnerships as we expand our business into AI data centers," CEO Choi Soo-yeon said in announcing the investment. The Panthalassa cheque sits alongside Naver's recent partnership with Nvidia on a global AI factory and its $9 billion Brookfield-backed GAK Sejong buildout, which is due to begin generating revenue in the first half of 2027 starting at 55 megawatts.
From Thiel money to Korean cloud
Panthalassa raised $140 million in a Series B round led by Peter Thiel in May 2026, with participation from Salesforce founder Marc Benioff and Hanwha Asset Management. The Naver deal is the first strategic investment from an Asian hyperscaler and signals that Panthalassa's Ocean-3 launch has moved from science project to procurement decision. It also fits a broader theme of AI compute crawling into ever more unconventional real estate, from mile-deep gravity SMRs to in-house AI chip teams at frontier labs.
Reporting based on coverage from The Korea Times, Data Center Dynamics and Naver disclosures.