# Brian Moffat Co-founder and **Chief Innovation Officer** of [[Panthalassa]], the Portland, Oregon wave-powered AI data center company. Engineering counterpart to CEO [[Garth Sheldon-Coulson]]: where Sheldon-Coulson is the energy-systems strategist and external face, Moffat is the inventor responsible for the physical architecture of the **Ocean-3 node** — the floating sphere + submerged tube design that distinguishes Panthalassa from a generation of failed tethered wave-energy systems. ## Background **Disney Imagineering.** Early-career engineering work at Disney's R&D arm. Imagineering is one of the rare commercial environments outside aerospace where engineers routinely build large, structurally complex moving systems that have to work reliably with non-engineer humans interacting with them — a relevant training ground for any team building autonomous unmanned floating platforms. **Google.** Engineer at Google; invented and **patented a face-identification algorithm** during his tenure. The face-ID patent is a useful resume detail not because it relates to Panthalassa's product but because it demonstrates a track record of getting novel inventions through the patent process — a relevant credential for a company whose competitive moat depends on hard-to-replicate physical IP. **Spindrift Energy.** Before founding Panthalassa, Moffat developed a novel wave-energy power-generation system at Spindrift Energy, supported by an **Energy Innovations Small Grant from the California Energy Commission**. He built a prototype device and completed testing. Spindrift was effectively the technical R&D phase that became the seed of Panthalassa's eventual node architecture. ## Role at Panthalassa As **Chief Innovation Officer**, Moffat owns the technical architecture of the node, the simulation stack (the company runs hundreds of physics simulations per week against the Ocean-3 design), the wave-tank validation work at Oregon State University, and the at-sea prototype trials (Ocean-1 and Ocean-2 in 2021, Wavehopper in 2024). The single-moving-part architecture — buoyant 50m spherical head, 60–70m submerged vertical tube, internal water turbine, no seafloor tether — is principally Moffat's design choice. The simplification thesis (*"we said we have to reduce this problem to something simpler...with no moving parts at all, except maybe one water turbine"*) is the engineering corollary to Sheldon-Coulson's energy-systems thesis. ## Why This Page Exists Moffat is KB-relevant as the engineer behind one of the most ambitious physical-infrastructure bets in the [[Peter Thiel]] / [[Founders Fund]] orbit. The Thiel cluster has a documented preference for founders backed by defensible-physics IP rather than software-only moats ([[Palmer Luckey]] at [[Anduril]], the SpaceX team, etc.); Moffat fits that template precisely. The Panthalassa wager — that wave energy can be the third primary-energy source after solar and nuclear, and that the architecture has to be a single-moving-part device mass-produced from plate steel — is a Moffat bet as much as a Sheldon-Coulson one. ## See Also - [[Panthalassa]] — Company - [[Garth Sheldon-Coulson]] — Co-founder and CEO - [[Peter Thiel]] — Series B lead - [[The Quest for 90 Gigawatts]] — Infrastructure context ## Sources - LinkedIn — [Brian Moffat](https://www.linkedin.com/in/moffatbrian/) - Gigascale Capital — [Panthalassa: Harnessing Ocean Power at Terawatt Scale](https://gigascale.com/profiles/panthalassa-harnessing-ocean-power/) - ZoomInfo — [Brian Moffat, Chief Innovation Officer at Panthalassa](https://www.zoominfo.com/p/Brian-Moffat/1850667224)