$140 Million in Funding Secured For Flotilla of Ocean-Powered Data Centers

Peter Thiel, the billionaire German-American entrepreneur and Paypal founder, has just put up a serious bag of bread behind Panthalassa’s big scheme of a billion-dollar “ocean data center.” The Ocean Power Technologies’ conceptual project is now looking closer still yet to becoming the world’s first data center to harness its energy from the very source of surfing’s pride and joy, the ocean’s waves themselves. Yippy.

Thiel, a mastermind of things that make most of our lives diabolically simpler yet evermore twisted, has just rounded up funding to the tune of $140m for the flotilla of ocean-prowling data centers, per the Financial Times. Previously, there’s been talk, but mostly just that, of establishing data centers out in the open ocean where they might cool more simply, more rapidly, and less-bothersomely than, say, the arid outskirts of a town near you. In theory, it sounds like a nice idea, and why not? Maybe it’ll all fall into perfect place and suit the technological excesses of the many, if even just for the time being.

It sure beats the prospect of having your child trot off to football practice in a field not so far off from one of these virtually unbridled factories of fresh hell, doesn’t it? Who, after all, wants their offspring putting their little adolescent lungs on overdrive within a smoggy cocktail of nitrogen oxides, methane, volatile organic compounds, particulate matter, and some prodigious heat, less noticed and perhaps more welcomed in some places than others, to be sure. But all this while it siphons off the cool, clear waters of rivers, lakes, and aquifers their tax dollars once helped to protect?

But what, oh what of our dear Mother Ocean? What say does the surf-going public have in this dire, seemingly imminent matter? Will these brutish warehouses, veritable seas of CPUs, GPUs, and servers, turn up the temps at your local peak? Many of us might be for that; however, can we disregard the well-being (existence?) of our piscine pals and every other last critter in the sea?

After all, to paraphrase a prescient surf philosopher of yesteryear, if these are my waves, and your waves, and, lo, Mr. Thiel et al.’s waves, doesn’t that make them our waves? Doesn’t that put these menacing chambers of yesterday’s unread emails (guilty as charged) among multitudinous other trifles in all our backyards?

When, where, and how does it all end? Evidently, more questions than answers abound at this brave new juncture in this all too weird day and age.