Startups

Picture thousands of giant steel orbs bobbing in the Pacific Ocean, each one quietly running AI models while powered entirely by the waves beneath them. No power grid. No cooling towers. No angry neighbors fighting a new data center build. Peter Thiel just bet $140 million that this isn’t science fiction. Portland-based startup Panthalassa announced its Series B this week to build what might be the most audacious answer yet to AI’s insatiable hunger for electricity: autonomous, wave-powered computing nodes that operate in the open ocean. And in a world where companies are exploring space-based solar and nuclear micro-reactors to keep the lights on, floating data centers might actually be the conservative option. ...

What if the biggest breakthrough in AI isn’t a better chatbot — but an AI that doesn’t need human knowledge at all? That’s the bet David Silver is making. The man who created AlphaGo just announced that his startup, Ineffable Intelligence, has raised a staggering $1.1 billion in seed funding at a $5.1 billion valuation. It’s the largest seed round in European history, backed by Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed, Nvidia, Google, and the UK government’s Sovereign AI Fund. ...