
Iceotope raises £30m for immersive cooling
UK immersive cooling developer Iceotope Technologies has raised £30m ($36m, €35m) to boost growth. This brings the total raised to over $73m since the company formed in 2005 in Sheffield.
The funding was led by Singapore impact private equity firm ABC Impact and includes strategic investments from nVent, a global provider of electrical connection and protection solutions, as well as SDCL Energy Efficiency Income Trust plc. Other investors in this round include Northern Gritstone, British Patient Capital, Pavilion Capital, and existing investor, Edinv.
As part of a strategic alliance with Iceotope, nVent will offer new modular integrated solutions for data centres, edge facilities, and high-performance computing applications. This alliance will further drive the rapid deployment of Iceotope’s technology globally through its suite of data centre systems.
The company has been working with Intel and HPE since 2019 on the technology, and last week demonstrated its Ku:l Precision Immersion Cooling system compared to a traditional air-cooled system using a 19.6kW load comprising 16x HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen10 servers under stress test conditions.
Laboratory tests, using industry-standard high power computing benchmarks across a range of ambient temperatures, showed the Iceotope system enabled a 4% increase in performance with zero throttling in higher ambient temperatures at server level and consumed 1kW less energy at rack level than its air-cooled counterpart. This represents a 5% energy saving in the IT alone and a 30% saving at scale based on a typical cooling power usage effectiveness (pPUE) of 1.4 in air and 1.04 in liquid cooled data centres.
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“This significant investment is one of the largest amounts recently invested in liquid cooling,” said David Craig, CEO of Iceotope Technologies. “It is a testament to the great work of our designers for our customers across the globe as well as the many technology and channel partners that have placed their trust in our ability to cool data centre servers more efficiently in a vertical rack form factor. Given the global importance of the data centre sector, which can only increase as edge facilities proliferate and extend to the far reaches of civilization, we look forward to accelerating our global deployment plan with the help of our new and existing investment partners.”
While liquid cooling is long-established and has become the standard in high-performance computing (HPC) applications, air-cooling had been the preferred approach in cooling large data enterprise, co-location and cloud data centres. This situation is changing rapidly as the adoption of liquid cooling accelerates, with the global data centre liquid cooling market expected to grow at a CAGR of 24.8% to $6.4 billion by 2027.
Iceotope’s patented Chassis-level Precision Immersion Cooling offers up to 96% water reduction, up to 40% power reduction, and up to 40% carbon emissions reduction per kW of ITE. The chassis is totally sealed and protects the critical IT from the surrounding environment and atmosphere. Industry-standard form factors allow simple maintenance and hot-swapping to be carried out – in any location – with ease, without mess, nor the need for heavy lifting gear.
“I’m excited to deepen our relationship with Iceotope. Together we’ve created sustainable, innovative cooling solutions that efficiently solve for heat and avoid downtime in data centres,” said Joe Ruzynski, nVent President of Enclosures. “Moving forward, we have the opportunity to build on our success and drive the next phase of precision immersion cooling solutions in an exciting and growing space.”
“Climate and water solutions form a key investment theme for us. Given that a large share of data growth in the coming years is expected to come from Asia with the advent of IoT and the 5G rollout, data centres in the region are set to proliferate,” said Tan Shao Ming, Chief Investment Officer at ABC Impact.
“Iceotope’s precision cooling solutions enable data centres to transit to a more sustainable infrastructure with a reduced environmental and real estate footprint. By increasing efficiency in their use of energy and water, data centres can contribute to global efforts to reduce carbon emissions. We see vast potential to deploy this technology in Asia, especially regions with tropical climates, and we look forward to working with Iceotope to scale its positive impact,” he said.
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- Iceotope teams for heat recovery from immersive cooling
- Three team for immersion cooled Lenovo HPC edge server
- Microsoft teams for server immersive cooling
- New techniques for immersion cooling of electric vehicles
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