Running on Nvidia at the ocean’s edge

From anchoring medusas to docking drones, proactive intelligence is reshaping life on board — Star Trek–grade technology for yacht captains and shipyards.

Intro

A friend at NASA, David Mauro, once told me that all human artifacts ultimately fall into two categories: those that fly, and those that don’t.

As a kid, I drew starship cockpits. I grew up with science fiction, trained to think in terms of systems before objects. So when I found myself designing the IoT for yachts, I realized: this is the closest thing to those imagined starships — the most ambitious challenge in an artifact that doesn’t fly.

When I encountered yachting a year ago, I saw the paradox: Italy leads the world in building these masterpieces, but the industry still speaks a pre-digital dialect, inadequate for the complexity of today’s yachts.

The Perfect Storm

The yachting industry is entering a perfect storm — three converging forces that no longer arrive one after another, but all at once. What was once tradition and incremental refinement is now being reshaped by systemic pressure.

1. The first force is Generational. A new wave of owners who made their wealth scaling fintech unicorns or blockchain platforms. They’re fluent in tech, intelligent systems, and expect the same at sea. Owners who can’t accept that their 60-meter yachts won’t show energy use and route data on an iPad with the precision he applies to track fintech investments, or that he can’t access cabins as seamlessly as he unlocks his car or manages his smart home. Crude interfaces and opaque systems are no longer tolerated. And dressing up a vessel with a Christmas tree of gadgets won’t fix it.

2. The second is technical. Shipyards have become orchestrators of a growing network of subcontractors, suppliers, and technology providers — but the system is reaching a breaking point. This is no longer about choosing a sofa or wiring a slightly more complex electrical plant. It’s about hybrid propulsion, distributed energy systems, intelligent stabilizers, advanced navigation layers. Relying only on the captain’s experience and hoping for the best is no longer sustainable. Captains must be empowered with new superpowers, not crushed under a heavier load of tasks. A shipyard that weakens its captains risks undermining its own market power. One that strengthens them gains loyalty and long-term leadership.

3. The third force, the most disruptive of all, is artificial intelligence. Other industries were reshaped by external shocks — electrification flipped the automotive sector, turning Tesla into a myth while legacy brands stumbled. In yachting, the external shock is even bigger: AI redefines everything. But here lies both the challenge and the opportunity. The AI industry has no real maritime experience, and scraping YouTube or AIS feeds won’t solve that gap. Shipyards, instead, hold a unique asset: decades of tacit, non-digitized knowledge and a growing mountain of data gathered at sea. That combination can turn disruption into dominance.
   
   Yachting is a powerful niche: market surpassed USD 10.7 billion in 2023 and is projected to grow at 6% CAGR through 2032, driven by rising ultra-high-net-worth individuals (Global Market Insights, 2024), demanding even larger superyachts (100meters, four decks, or more)

Consider the scale: Italy alone accounts for nearly 50% of the global superyacht market, with 11 of the world’s top 20 builders headquartered there. This isn’t just craftsmanship — it’s global leadership.

And this is exactly why it makes sense that the AI of the seas is born in Italy. It isn’t about chasing foundation models or building another GenAI from scratch. It’s about translating the unmatched expertise of Italian shipyards into digital form — and combining it with years of real-world data collected at sea, refined into a deterministic, maritime-grade intelligence.

This is the perfect storm: three waves colliding at once. It’s no longer a matter of whether to innovate. It’s a matter of survival — and the greatest opportunity this industry has ever had.

Intelligent Nodes and the AI of the Sea

From this systemic pressure, the question becomes: where do we start? The answer is already on board. Years of data collected at sea, distilled into deterministic intelligence, now embodied in D.gree and its Intelligent Nodes.

For years, on dozens of yachts, it has been collecting and processing thousands of datapoints every five seconds — navigation, performance, onboard systems. This is a deterministic AI, built on machine learning, that learns from the sea.
Unlike generic AI prone to hallucinations, this is deterministic — designed for reliability at sea: This is the AI born and emerged by the Sea.

How does it work? Think Star Trek: Kirk at the helm, Scotty with engines and reactors. D.gree lives in the engine room, talks to every system on board, and emerges on the bridge — at the captain’s side.

Now add Intelligent Nodes: compact, rugged units bringing real-time edge computing to the ocean. They don’t just log data. They analyze anchor behavior, hull vibrations, propulsion anomalies — turning raw signals into actionable insight on the spot. They run offline, filter noise, reduce cloud traffic, and integrate cyber-resilience.

At the core: Nvidia Jetson Orin, the most advanced edge AI platform available today: born for next-gen robotics and edge solutions. Each node embeds an Ampere GPU with up to 2,048 CUDA cores, delivering 275 TOPS (delivering up to 275 trillion operations per second) with unprecedented energy efficiency. That means running complex neural networks — vibration analysis, pattern recognition, predictive diagnostics — directly on board, in real time, without relying on satellite links.

Through Nvidia’s CUDA-X and DeepStream ecosystems, D.gree integrates computer vision models for drone or camera feeds, and inference pipelines optimized for multiple sensors in parallel. With TensorRT, neural networks are compressed and accelerated, cutting latency and power consumption.

Bringing Nvidia onboard isn’t about adding a chip. It’s about connecting yachting to a global ecosystem already powering autonomous cars, industrial robots, and defense systems. Technologies validated in the toughest environments, now tuned for the sea. And with years of D.gree data as foundation, this is not speculative — it’s maritime-grade, and it’s ready today.

Near Future — The Star Trek Scenario

What’s next? A horizon where technologies stop being passive tools and become proactive allies of the captain.

Think of it this way: a refrigerator just sits there and does its job. It doesn’t know it’s a fridge, it doesn’t know what it contains, it doesn’t know if humans are opening it or what they need.

That’s a passive technology. On a yacht, thousands of passive technologies create the illusion of control — an illusion that collapses when complexity scales.

Reactive technologies are better: they respond to a command, an action, a need. But managing a thousand reactive subsystems on a 100-meter vessel still means endless workload.

The real leap is proactive intelligence: systems that anticipate, detect, and act before the human even asks. That’s where Intelligent Nodes and maritime-grade AI redefine life on board.

Emerging marine connectivity — from mesh Wi-Fi buoys to microcells embedded in ports — opens continuous communication between yachts and coastal infrastructure. From there, applications that once sounded like sci-fi become operational:

• Anchoring medusas: floating sensor structures linked to Intelligent Nodes, monitoring seabed, currents, and anchor safety.

• Docking drones: mapping quays and obstacles with Lidar and cameras, delivering predictive guidance for maneuvers.

• Smart cabins: adjusting comfort and energy consumption based on external conditions, guest presence, and preferences.

• Dynamic digital twins: real-time replicas of the vessel for predictive maintenance, simulation, and crew training.

The building blocks are already here: edge computing, resilient networks, advanced sensors. The next leap isn’t technical — it’s design. Creating an onboard experience intuitive for humans, intelligent for machines.

Conclusions

The yachting industry has never faced systemic pressure of this magnitude. Mastery of complexity doesn’t come from simplification or isolating systems — it comes from data.

Shipyards and owners already hold years of real-world data, collected at sea. Italy is uniquely positioned to anchor this shift. Not by waving a flag, but because Italian shipyards lead the global market, concentrate the world’s most advanced craftsmanship, and hold direct access to the owners and investors shaping tomorrow’s demand.
When shipyards digitize their expertise and connect it with maritime data, they create a foundation rooted in the (Italian) genius loci — context, tacit knowledge, and craftsmanship that technology giants can enable but never originate.

People of the sea, always respectful of its power, can look cautious with technology. That caution isn’t a weakness — it’s wisdom. Transformation is demanding, but it can be built one retrofit at a time, one proactive function at a time, one new capability for each stakeholder.

At sea, every wave leaves a trace. Every trace builds intelligence. That’s how the sea forges its own robots — and only those who design with it will keep command.

For the kid I was, that’s not just technology — it’s design at starship scale, shaped for the sea.