The billionaire who wants to give away the seafloor

The man who made his fortune selling virtual worlds on Steam is spending it on the least explored part of the real one. This is the story of Inkfish, of a submarine named after a Philippine dragon, and of an $815 million ship whose final product will be a map that won't be sold: it will be given away.

In June 2026, the Norwegian shipyard Vard signed the largest contract in its history: nearly 700 million euros, about 815 million dollars, for a single ship. It wasn't ordered by an oil major or a navy, but by the marine research organization of a man from Seattle who became a multibillionaire selling video games. Gabe Newell, Valve co-founder, creator of Half-Life and of Steam, the store where half of gaming humanity buys its virtual worlds, is building the most capable ocean-exploring machine ever made.

Less than 30% of the seafloor is mapped. Steam is going to fund the map, and the map will be free.

The organization is called Inkfish, and its premise fits in one sentence that should embarrass us as a species: less than 30% of the seafloor is mapped to modern standards. We have better maps of Mars than of the planet we live on, because water blocks electromagnetic waves and every kilometer of depth has to be earned with ships, sonar and robots, meter by meter. Newell decided that map was a worthy destination for a fortune: not an expedition, a permanent fleet.

He isn't starting from scratch. In 2022, Inkfish bought the ship and submersible of Victor Vescovo, the Five Deeps explorer: the first crewed vehicle in history to touch the deepest point of all five oceans, Mariana Trench included. Newell renamed them with a gamer's humor: the support ship is now Dagon, after the sea god of the horror tales, and the submersible is Bakunawa, the dragon of Philippine mythology that swallows the moon. The fleet has since added the vessel Hydra and a second, 100-meter ship, the RV6000, already under construction at the same yard. The numbers in the names are no accident: they are the depth in meters each ship is meant to work at.

The RV11000, delivery expected in 2030, is that logic's flagship: 11,000 meters means being able to operate at the bottom of the planet's deepest trench. It will measure 162 meters, house 130 crew and scientists and carry two crewed submersibles, a hangar with a moon pool (the indoor pool through which robots are launched in open swell) and a winch with 12,000 meters of cable to power and pilot remotely operated vehicles in the abyss. It will also carry the largest battery ever installed on a ship, good for twelve hours of operation in total silence: engine noise dirties the sonar and scares off the very animals you came to study.

This is where the story becomes ours. On land, when a robot has a human hidden behind it, we are usually looking at a marketing trick, like the ones we document in our demos investigation. Underwater, teleoperation is not an embarrassment but physics: at 11 kilometers down no radio signal gets through, so an underwater robot is either tied to a 12-kilometer cable with a human pilot at the other end, or it swims alone and blind, unable to call for help. The ocean is the only place in the world where the question we ask every robot (who decides, the machine or a person?) is not answered by the marketing department: it is answered by the water.

And then there is the strangest decision of all: giving the result away. Inkfish has committed to publishing its expeditions' data (the maps, the samples, the new species) in open-access scientific repositories. There is a beautiful irony in the man who built software's most successful paid platform distributing for free the product of the world's most expensive private science machine. It is the difference between buying a yacht and buying a legacy: the seafloor map that researchers use in 2040 will quietly contain a great many hours of Half-Life.

In this house we look for the person behind the machine, and rarely is the signal this clear. The machines in this story will be sonars, winches and robots hanging from 12-kilometer cables; the person is a Seattle programmer who no longer needs to sell anything and chose, among all the things money can do, to finish the map of his own planet and leave it at the door, wrapped, for anyone who wants it.