One of the best success stories that has developed through the incubation of the Wells Fargo Innovation Incubator (IN2) of NREL under the U.S. Department of Energy, belongs to Liquid Cool Solutions. Earlier the company was known as Hardcore Computer. It was based on the first systems the startup built, i.e., high-performance gaming systems. Unfortunately, with that name, the company couldn’t get through spam filters at many of the large companies. So, the startup had to change its original name.

Quite interestingly, LiquidCool uses an electrically nonconductive heat-transfer fluid to cool down electronics, often in data centres. Traditionally those centres were cooled with air,
but as chips get stronger to manage artificial intelligence and machine learning, they also get much hotter.

Pointing at the industry’s transition, David Roe, Program Manager at LiquidCool said, “It’s been known for decades that you can cool certain electronics using a fluid. Electrical transformers are cooled using a very similar fluid. One of the challenges we’ve had is that, for a lot of reasons, data center operators were reluctant to bring liquid in. But now they have to – the chips are just too hot. The fluid removes heat but does not short out the
electronics, and in our case, we can remove the heat from the hottest chips and remove the heat from all the other components in the liquid as well.”

Where is the innovation? Instead of using a traditional waterbased approach, Liquid Cool uses a commercially available dielectric liquid that conducts heat but not electricity. It removes heat and does not cause any short circuits.

According to Herb Zien, former CEO and now Vice Chairman of LiquidCool, “There’s also a cold plate that’s submerged in the liquid. We can remove heat from the hottest chips and remove heat from all the other components in the same liquid. It’s a very efficient way to get the job done. We’ve reduced the amount of power to cool a data center by up to 98% compared to air cooling.”


Pravita Iyer

Publisher & Director