Energy Dept. funded JetCool nets $17M to disrupt chip cooling as AI workloads surge

MIT spinoff JetCool Technologies, a Department of Energy-backed startup working on a direct-to-chip liquid cooling technology for enterprise data centers, today announced $17 million in a series A round of funding, led by Bosch Ventures.

The investment, which also saw participation from In-Q-Tel, Raptor Ventures and Schooner Capital, takes the company’s total capital raised to nearly $27 million. It comes at a time when enterprises across sectors are racing to upgrade their data center infrastructure for next-gen AI workloads and looking for next-gen cooling tech – beyond power-hungry air cooling. 

“In the rapidly evolving tech landscape, with advanced AI platforms and complex chip designs, there’s an urgent need to address increasing heat, power, and water consumption in data centers. With support from Bosch Ventures, IQT, and our current investors, JetCool is poised to meet this demand and revolutionize the cooling industry,” Bernie Malouin, the CEO of the company, said in a statement.

According to Persistence Market Research, the liquid cooling market accounted for $2.25 billion in 2021 and is expected to grow nearly 26% to $31.07 billion by 2032.

What makes JetCool unique?

While liquid cooling has been around for quite some time, often seen as the answer to air cooling, it is typically executed in the form of immersion cooling, which uses dielectric fluids in a bath, or two-phase dielectric cooling, which boils specialized chemicals to cool the chip. While both of these methods work, they are not capable of handling high-power chipsets like those seen in generative AI or may face availability challenges due to regulations.

JetCool circumvents these problems with a patented microjet impingement technology — called microconvective liquid cooling — that uses small fluid jets within compact cooling modules, transforming high-power electronic cooling performance at the chip or die level using safe, water-based coolants.

“Our innovative technology incorporates a direct-to-die liquid cooling module, a cold plate form factor, and a self-contained system optimized for server cooling,” Malouin told VentureBeat. “At its core, this advanced technology utilizes microjets to target hot spots with pinpoint accuracy on the latest chipsets, maximizing heat extraction and allowing for enhanced thermal performance, about 3-5X better performance over microchannel cold plates.”

Malouin started working on the cooling tech with a team of engineers at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. In 2019, the project, known as “JETS,” was spun off into a separate entity — now known as JetCool — targeting high-performance cooling to new application areas, with a focus on improving computing efficiency and performance.

Currently, the company offers its tech in two form factors: Cold Plates and SmartPlate Systems. The former is compatible with any of today’s liquid cooling infrastructure, enables 3-5X lower thermal resistance compared to microchannel cold plates and cools the latest Intel, AMD and Nvidia chipsets, including those over 1,500W.

Meanwhile, the latter is a plug-and-play self-contained version available through Dell.

“This solution has the same footprint as an air-cooled server but cools up to 850W in a 1U (rack unit) and 1,200W in a 2U with no piping or plumbing required (as seen with typical liquid cooling deployments,” the CEO noted. 

Impact across sectors

Since its launch, JetCool has worked with many customers, including OEMs and hyperscalers, to provide an advanced liquid cooling solution for compute-intensive workloads spanning generative AI, healthcare and finance.

Malouin did not share the exact names of these buyers, but he did note that the technology is already making an impact by enabling 30% faster processing while reducing energy consumption by 50% and water usage by 90% over air cooling.

“JetCool cold plates are deployed at federal labs today, where we’re improving efficiencies, running servers with coolant temperatures up to 130° F (54.4º C) and no water consumption, eliminating the use of its evaporative cooler, saving 90% in water usage per year,” Malouin said. “Meanwhile, our self-contained solutions are deployed today at colocations where they are seeing energy savings from both the rack and facility level. These self-contained solutions are also deployed at financial institutions where they are cooling next-generation chipsets at ambient temperatures over 95º F (35º C).”

With this funding, the company plans to take this work to the next level and fuel global growth. It will expand its cooling solutions to create sustained advancements in efficiency, performance, reliability and sustainability for data centers, HPCs and semiconductors.

Along with JetCool, Purdue University is also working on a jet-based cooling technology for data centers. This project has also been backed by the DOE.