Drogue Raises $20M to Power Floating Data Centers With Ocean Heat

Drogue, a Washington, D.C.-based startup designing floating data centers powered by ocean temperature gradients, has raised $20 million in venture funding, TechCrunch reported. The company intends to use the capital to build and deploy a multi-megawatt prototype aboard a commercial ship by early 2028.

Investors backing the round include XYZ Venture Capital, Toyota Ventures, Tamarack Global, Dream, FDVC, Garuda Ventures, Flexcap, Boost VC, and Slow Ventures, among others.

Founded six months ago by Chief Executive Officer Sam Sipe, a former U.S. Navy pilot, Drogue is targeting the grid interconnection queues stalling artificial intelligence infrastructure on land. Terrestrial data center developments routinely face eight-to-ten-year lead times to negotiate power capacity and utility interconnection with regional transmission organizations. Sipe argues that shifting compute offshore allows developers to bring online substantial power capacity without waiting on terrestrial utility reforms.

The startup relies on ocean thermal energy conversion, or OTEC, a thermodynamic concept first developed in the 1950s and tested in the 1980s. The process exploits the temperature differential between sun-warmed surface water and cold water roughly 1,000 meters deep, which averages 39 degrees Fahrenheit (4 degrees Celsius).

In Drogue's closed-loop system, warm surface seawater is drawn in to absorb heat from onboard server racks. That heated water is then used to boil liquid ammonia, which vaporizes at minus 28 degrees Fahrenheit. The expanding ammonia gas drives a turbine to generate electricity before entering a condenser. Cold seawater pumped from 1,000 meters depth cools the condenser fins, converting the ammonia gas back into liquid to repeat the cycle, while the warmed seawater is pumped back to the deep ocean to dissipate.

While historical OTEC projects were abandoned due to high capital requirements, deep-water piping constraints, and the cost of subsea transmission cables to carry power to land, Drogue avoids the transmission bottleneck by consuming the power at sea. Because servers are compact and exporting digital data is significantly cheaper than transmitting high-voltage electricity to shore, Sipe contends modern pipe fabrication and heat-exchanger manufacturing make offshore compute viable.

Drogue has secured an initial "approval in principle" safety evaluation from the American Bureau of Shipping. The startup is now acquiring its first commercial vessel for hull conversion ahead of the planned 2028 sea trials, with long-term designs slated to use specialized semi-submersible structures resembling offshore oil platforms with roughly ten-year operating lifespans.