OceanPal, a Greece-based shipowner and operator of dry bulk vessels and product tankers, has completed a $120 million investment deal to launch SovereignAI, a new subsidiary focused on developing blockchain-native artificial intelligence infrastructure.
The company says it will continue its core role in seaborne transportation of bulk commodities and refined petroleum products while expanding into digital technologies supporting AI and blockchain applications.
SovereignAI will act as OceanPal’s vehicle for implementing a digital asset treasury strategy centred on the NEAR ecosystem, which supports AI applications built around privacy, governance and user-owned data.
The company aims to acquire up to 10% of NEAR’s token supply while developing AI infrastructure that combines confidentiality and decentralisation using NVIDIA technology.
“We believe NEAR presents the greatest asymmetric upside across mature projects in the digital asset market, which we aim to capture and offer to our shareholders,” said OceanPal’s newly appointed Co-CEO Sal Ternullo, previously of State Street, KPMG, and A100x.
“This is a public company launching as an active, strategic partner with the NEAR Foundation to advance a shared vision of universal AI sovereignty by leveraging the NEAR Protocol’s vertically integrated AI products and rails, which were purpose-built for these exact use cases.”
“We plan to use this decentralised, confidential compute infrastructure to capitalise on the explosive demand for privacy-first, regulatory compliant AI across enterprise markets including finance, healthcare, and media while enabling businesses and consumers to maintain control and ownership.”
The NEAR Foundation will collaborate with SovereignAI on the initiative. NEAR co-founder and CEO Illia Polosukhin said the partnership will help to realise “a shared vision of achieving true universal AI sovereignty by enabling private, user-owned AI and autonomous agent commerce.”
Following the launch of SovereignAI, OceanPal says it will maintain its fleet operations under existing time charter and spot market contracts while pursuing opportunities to integrate digital and AI-driven systems that support efficiency, transparency and long-term value creation across its shipping and technology investments.
