Semiconductor cooling startup Corintis announced on Sept. 25 that it closed a $24 million Series A funding round and a collaboration with Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) that achieved a breakthrough chip cooling system three times more effective than current technology.
Lip-Bu Tan became a board director and investor at Corintis prior to his appointment as Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) CEO, Corintis said.
According to Corintis, BlueYard Capital led the round, with participation from Founderful, Acequia Capital, Celsius Industries, and XTX Ventures. To date, Corintis has raised $33.4 million.
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Intel CEO Tan Says Corintis Is Becoming Industry Leader With 10,000 Systems Deployed
The Switzerland-based company emerged from stealth with a solution to one of AI's most pressing limitations: heat. Corintis says it has already manufactured over 10,000 cooling systems with deployments running in data centers on leading-edge AI chips.
Nvidia’s (NASDAQ:NVDA) recent adoption of liquid cooling for its latest generations of data center graphics processing units highlighted this key demand.
“Cooling is one of the biggest challenges for next-generation chips,” Tan said in the statement. “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.”
Microsoft Collaboration Proves 3X Cooling Performance Gain Works at Scale
Microsoft announced on Sept. 23 that it successfully developed an in-chip microfluidic cooling system for servers running core services in collaboration with Corintis. Tests showed microfluidic cooling embedded inside the chip removed heat three times better than the most advanced technology commonly used today.
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“Every chip is unique," Corintis co-founder and CEO Remco van Erp described the challenge in the startup's statement. " 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.”
Van Erp added: "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. Our mission is 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 center today.”
Microsoft said the technology reduced the maximum temperature rise inside a GPU by 65%, though results vary by chip type. The software giant added that the bio-inspired design resembles the veins of a leaf or the wings of a butterfly, channeling coolant through chips in the same efficient way nature distributes resources.
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Microfluidic Technology Targets 10X Better Cooling for AI Data Centers
The early versions of OpenAI‘s ChatGPT trained on Nvidia chips using 400 watts of power, according to Corintis. Just four years later, new GPUs and AI accelerators require 10 times more power, making cooling a key hold-up for the industry.
Corintis says its solution relies on two main elements: co-designed microfluidic cooling and new manufacturing methods. The company develops simulation and optimization software to design micro-scale optimized liquid cooling adapted to specific chips.
The technology 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. Corintis says the technology also enables data centers to reduce their water consumption.
Corintis bases its technology on research conducted at the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland. The company plans to open multiple U.S. offices to better serve American customers in addition to an engineering office in Munich.
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