Coming out of stealth mode, semiconductor cooling startup Corintis has today announced that it has raised a $24 million Series A to address the problem of liquid cooling at scale. To date, the company has raised $33.4 million in total.
The growth of AI is hampered by computational power. Increasing demands for AI to become ever more powerful and ever more accessible have placed a requirement for there to be ever more powerful computer chips. However, increasingly powerful chips produce more heat, making cooling a key bottleneck. The early versions of OpenAI’s ChatGPT were trained on NVIDIA chips, which used 400W of power.
However, only 4 years later, new GPUs and AI accelerators are already looking to increase the power requirements by 10x, which requires liquid cooling. NVIDIA’s recent adoption of liquid cooling for its latest generations of data centre GPUs has highlighted this key demand.
Based on research conducted at the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, Corintis was co-founded by Dr Remco van Erp (CEO), Sam Harrison (COO) and Prof Elison Matioli (Scientific Adviser). Corintis’s technology focuses on microfluidic cooling.
Optimised micro-scale liquid cooling for computer chips in data centres, which are used for advanced computation, including for generative AI. According to Remco van Erp, co-founder and CEO of Corintis, every chip is unique.
“It’s like a cityscape with hundreds of billions of transistors, connected by countless wires. Cooling today is not adapted to the chip, relying on simplistic designs where several parallel fins are carved into a block of copper with a blade.
But just like in nature, the optimal design for each chip is a complex network of precisely shaped micro-scale channels that are adapted to the chip and guide coolant to the most critical regions.
Finding the right design per chip to create increasingly better cooling systems under short timelines is a challenge that will only get harder.”
Thermal engineers need to pull a rabbit out of a hat on a daily basis to make sure chips don’t overheat and break, and that’s where Corintis comes in. The company aims to unlock 10x better cooling to enable the future of compute, in a short cycle time, and while leveraging the existing infrastructure investments in a data centre today.”
Corintis’ solution relies on two main elements to achieve its mission of 10x better cooling: Firstly, “co-designed microfluidic cooling”.
Corintis develops best-in-class simulation and optimisation software and new manufacturing methods to design micro-scale optimised liquid cooling, or Microfluidic cooling, that is adapted to the chip to bring the right liquid to the right location. This can be supplied as either a drop-in replacement to any liquid cooling system today, or integrated together with the chip, as "co-packaged cooling", to reach up to an order of magnitude increase in cooling performance. Their technology also enables data centres to reduce their water consumption, a key ecological concern of AI technologies. Corintis’ platform builds a bridge between chip and cooling design, enabling chip designers to build the next generation of AI chips with superior thermal performance.
The technology platforms the company has already developed include Glacierware, to help automate the design of cooling systems, a copper microfluidic manufacturing facility to manufacture cold plates with features as small as a human hair in high volume, and its Therminator platform, allowing chip companies to physically emulate next-gen chips with millimetre accuracy on silicon test chips before production to validate their cooling solution ahead of time. In addition to having several major American tech giants as customers, the company already enjoys a partnership with Microsoft to help bring this cutting-edge technology to the real world.
Earlier this week, Microsoft announced that in collaboration with Corintis, it has successfully achieved a breakthrough by developing an in-chip microfluidic cooling system that can effectively cool a server running core services. Tests showed that microfluidic cooling embedded inside the chip removed heat a staggering three times better than the most advanced technology commonly used today.
“The thermal margin is translated at the software layer to yield more performance and overclocking potential. It also enables new 3-D architectures for chips that are not possible today due to thermal limitations of stacking high-power SoCs without inner layer cooling,” said Husam Alissa, director of systems technology in Cloud Operations and Innovation at Microsoft, on the recent breakthrough.
BlueYard Capital led the funding with participation from Founderful, Acequia Capital, Celsius Industries, XTX Ventures, among others.
Corintis also announces that it will be opening multiple US offices to better serve its American customers in addition to an Engineering office in Munich, Germany.
As part of this funding, Chairman of Walden International and Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan has joined as a board director and investor prior to becoming Intel CEO, in addition to Geoff Lyon (former CEO & Founder of CoolIT), also joining the board. With this addition to the board, Corintis doubles down on building a bridge between the worlds of semiconductor design, manufacturing, and chip-cooling. Lip-Bu Tan added:
“Cooling is one of the biggest challenges for next-generation chips. Corintis is fast becoming the industry leader in advanced semiconductor cooling solutions to address the thermal bottleneck, as made evident by its growing customer list.”
David Byrd, general partner at BlueYard Capital, added:
“AI’s insatiable demand for compute is pushing chips to unprecedented power densities — Corintis is unlocking the next wave of performance by making cooling a design feature, not an afterthought.”
The company has already manufactured over ten thousand cooling systems, with deployments running in data centres on leading-edge AI chips. It has already achieved 8-digit cumulative revenue since its incorporation. It is on track to more than 10x this with its early deployments.
With new funding, the company aims to scale its already sizable team of 55 employees today to over 70 by the end of the year and expand its manufacturing footprint further, targeting a capacity of exceeding one million microfluidic cold plates annually by 2026.
Lead image: Corintis founders: Sam Harrison, co-founder, COO- Left, Remco van Erp, CEO - Right. Photo: uncredited.
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