The deal revealed Thursday extends a rapid buildout by Naver, which has been racing to secure AI capacity through a string of high-profile partnerships.
In July, the company, Nvidia and Brookfield Asset Management agreed to expand Naver's AI factory at its GAK Sejong hyperscale data center to 200 megawatts by 2028 under a $10 billion financing plan, one of the largest sovereign AI infrastructure commitments outside the United States.
Founded in Oregon in 2016, Panthalassa is developing buoyant data centers that draw power directly from ocean waves, sidestepping the fuel and land costs that weigh on conventional facilities. Its nodes generate electricity, run AI computations and cool their servers with cold seawater, all offshore and untethered to the grid.
The systems transmit results to shore through low-Earth-orbit satellite networks such as Starlink, which offer low latency well suited to AI inference and skirt the geographic limits of undersea cabling. The design lets the platforms perform AI workloads at sea without dedicated transmission lines.
Panthalassa has tested earlier platforms dubbed Ocean-1 and Ocean-2, and plans to deploy its Ocean-3 pilot series this year, targeting commercial operation in 2027.
"Naver is expanding into AI data centers and rapidly securing differentiated infrastructure through global partnerships," Naver CEO Choi Soo-yeon said.
"We will invest preemptively in next-generation technologies such as wave-based renewable AI data centers to strengthen our competitiveness in the global AI infrastructure market."
AJP Takeaways
• Naver said on Aug. 13, 2026, that it has invested in Panthalassa, an Oregon-based startup founded in 2016 that builds floating, wave-powered AI data centers cooled by seawater and linked to shore via low-Earth-orbit satellites such as Starlink.
• The deal builds on Naver's aggressive AI infrastructure push, including a July 2026 agreement with NVIDIA and Brookfield Asset Management to expand its AI factory at the GAK Sejong data center to 200 megawatts by 2028 under a $10 billion financing plan.
• Panthalassa, backed by investors including Peter Thiel, raised $140 million in May 2026 and plans to deploy its Ocean-3 pilot series this year, targeting commercial operation in 2027.
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