Peter Thiel just led a $140 million round into a startup that wants to put AI data centers in the ocean, and the cooling system is the ocean itself. The company is called Panthalassa, it is based in Oregon, and the Series B announced on May 5 pushed its valuation close to $1 billion. The pitch is that AI is running out of land, power, and patience, and the obvious move is to stop pretending the grid can keep up. Each unit is a self-propelled floating platform roughly 85 meters across, called Ocean-3. Wave turbines generate the power as the platform rises and falls in the swell. Seawater handles the cooling, which means no freshwater needed and no drought-region NIMBY meeting at the town hall. The compute runs onboard, and the answers travel back to land by satellite as inference tokens. The whole thing drifts in international waters and goes where the energy is, which is also literally the company’s tagline.…