A six-month-old startup wants to solve artificial intelligence's power problem by taking data centers to sea — and investors are already on board. Drogue, based in Washington, D.C., has raised $20 million to build floating data centers powered by heat from the ocean, the company told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview. Its first prototype, a multi-megawatt system fitted to a traditional oceangoing ship, is due to sail in early 2028.
The round drew backing from XYZ Venture Capital, Toyota Ventures, Tamarack Global, Dream, FDVC, Garuda Ventures, Flexcap, Boost VC and Slow Ventures, among others. Founder and chief executive Sam Sipe, a former US Navy pilot who flew E-2D Hawkeye aircraft from aircraft carriers, said the goal is to help data center developers deploy servers on timelines that match AI demand — something the land-based industry, with planning cycles of eight to ten years, cannot do.
How ocean heat becomes electricity
Drogue's system is based on ocean thermal energy conversion, or OTEC, an idea first developed in the 1950s and tested in the 1980s before being set aside. It exploits the temperature gap between sun-warmed surface water and the cold depths, which average about 39 degrees Fahrenheit (4 degrees Celsius).
Warm surface water first cools the data center, then boils ammonia, a chemical that turns to gas at minus 28 degrees Fahrenheit. The gas drives a turbine to generate electricity, then passes through a condenser cooled by water drawn from 1,000 metres down, turning the ammonia back into liquid so the cycle can repeat. Each vessel would stay at sea for about a decade.
Sipe argues the resource is effectively limitless: as the planet warms, the oceans absorb an additional 5.8 million terawatt-hours of energy every year, against roughly 180,000 terawatt-hours used by all of human civilisation. There is basically no amount of heat we can pull out of that that will collapse that temperature differential, he said.
A race to take data centers offshore
Drogue is not alone in looking seaward. Panthalassa, an Oregon startup, raised $140 million earlier this year for wave-powered floating data centers and has opened a factory in Vancouver, Washington, to build them. The logic is the same: data centers are compact, and shipping their output — data — off a platform is cheap, while sending power back to shore would need long, expensive cables.
The pitch also echoes Elon Musk's plan for orbital data centers: find a cheap source of power and put the computers next to it. Drogue's version skips the rockets. They can just sail a ship on the ocean, something humanity has been doing for millennia, TechCrunch noted.
Still a long way from the water
The company has approval in principle — a preliminary sign-off — from the American Bureau of Shipping, which sets safety standards for ships, and is now buying its first vessel. But it has named no data center customers, shared no pricing, and given no power-output target beyond multi-megawatt. The prototype is more than a year from the water.
Sipe, who sought out engineers from the 1980s OTEC experiments before starting the company, says the old idea failed on scale and manufacturing, not physics. Everyone was like, dude, this stuff works. It is just a matter of being able to raise enough capital to build something big enough, he said. Whether $20 million is enough to prove it remains the open question.
