Industry Insights The Wave Energy Revolution is Coming, But it Needs Autonomy In May of 2026 the Portland, Oregon based start-up Panthalassa raised $140 million in funding at a valuation reported near $1 billion. It hopes to build unmoored, buoy-like AI data centers in the open Pacific, powered by wave energy and connected to the internet by satellites. The first pilot nodes are planned for deployment later this year. Panthalassa is geographically well-positioned to pursue its idea, as the Pacific Northwest is a hotspot for marine research. Less than a hundred miles away, off the coast of Newport, Oregon, sits PacWave, the only grid-connected wave energy site in the continental United States. Geoff Hollinger, who leads the Robotic Decision Making Laboratory at Oregon State University, says that by some estimates up to 60% of the West Coast's energy needs could be met with marine energy. But wave energy is not a solved problem. Even Europe, the leader in this field, has only a handful of operational wave energy generation projects. One obstacle is the cost of the deployment and maintenance large wave energy generation arrays will require. "Doing things in the ocean is incredibly expensive, and hopefully these start-ups are thinking about how expensive it’s going to be," says Hollinger. Ships must move to the site, and the people who operate those ships need specialized knowledge. "If you scale up marine energy to the point where you have energy arrays along the whole coast, you would not have enough ships to service them. There's just no way." Hollinger's lab has spent four years on a Department of Energy-funded project researching how autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) can be adapted to solve this problem. A portion of the research has focused on something that seems deceptively simple: teaching AUVs to dock with