
Cooling technology specialist Iceotope in Sheffield, UK, has appointed a new CEO based in the US alongside a new chair.
Jonathan Ballon, based in San Francisco, was most recently President and CEO of SkyHive, a Generative AI company that was sold in 2024. He is also non-executive chair at Dutch chip startup Axelera AI which is planning a move into data centre chips and was a vice president at Intel working on OpenVINO AI and at Cisco.
The company has been run by two co-CEOs, Nathan Blom and chief financial officer Simon Jesenko, since the retirement of long term CEO David Craig last year.
Iceotope’s liquid cooling for AI systems is based on 52 patents with 90 more pending. It combines the benefits of immersion and the simplicity of direct-to-chip, with a pragmatic solution that exceeds the performance of both. The technology integrates into existing data centre environments.
“Iceotope is solving one of the most imminent AI challenges – extreme cooling efficiency for increasingly dense and power-hungry computing infrastructure”, said Jonathan Ballon. “The industry is actively seeking scalable, practical solutions, and Iceotope’s technology, refined over the last decade, is ready to meet that demand. The data center market is shifting toward liquid cooling.”
Alain Andreoli takes over as non-executive chair. Most recently, he was President and EVP of the Hybrid IT Group at HPE, which is a partner of Iceotope for its cooling systems. Previously he ran large businesses at Sun Microsystems, NTT and Texas Instruments.
“The future of AI computing hinges on our ability to efficiently remove heat from increasingly powerful processors. The liquid cooling for AI solutions invented by Iceotope are not only solving the scaling challenges of AI infrastructure but are also tackling critical issues related to energy efficiency and sustainability,” said Andreoli.
“Across my decades of experience, I’ve witnessed numerous technological inflection points that have reshaped industries. Today, liquid cooling stands at one such point, and Iceotope has the best technology to become the leader in this market.”
