Austin-based tech firm chosen for UT-Arlington project on data center cooling dilemma

Yahoo

27-05-2025

An Austin tech company is partnering with the University of Texas at Arlington to develop innovative methods for cooling chips in data centers.
Accelsius, an Austin-based company focused on two-phase, direct-to-chip liquid cooling, was selected as a contributor to a federal project looking to develop a hybrid cooling method for use in data centers.
Data centers are large facilities housing servers that deliver computing power for essential services, from emergency operations to smartphones. Most data centers use air circulation or liquid cooling systems, which consume significant energy and water, to prevent chips from overheating and enable continuous 24/7 operation.
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The project, which is under the U.S. Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E) larger COOLERCHIPS project, is being led by Dereje Agonafer, a professor at UT-Arlington, with the goal of reducing total cooling energy consumption to less than 5% of a data center's IT load.
"The government is actually concerned that as these chips get hotter, the architectures for cooling them won't keep up and therefore will impede progress on AI enablement, development and deployment," Accelsius CEO Josh Claman told the American-Statesman.
Claman, who previously worked as an executive at Dell Technologies, launched his startup Accelsius three years ago, just before OpenAI's ChatGPT launched to the world.
Claman said data centers have historically operated inefficiently, often shifting the extra energy costs of cooling onto tenants. He added that approximately 40% of the energy required to run these facilities 24/7 is wasted on cooling and overhead.
"This was always sort of an issue that was near to my heart. Why can't we do this more efficiently?" Claman said. "Air is a terrible transport of heat, everyone knows that. If you have a 100 megawatt data center, you're wasting about 40 megawatts on cooling and overhead. That seems absurd. But it's been tolerated."
These additional energy costs, the substantial strain on power grids and the significant water usage required to operate and cool data centers have been at the heart of community protests for several years. A recent report by Data Center Watch, a research organization that tracks data center opposition, found that about $64 billion in data center development nationwide has been stalled due to community pushback.
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With water-based cooling, Claman says data centers can open themselves up to leaks and possibly expensive damage. Servers in data centers can be worth upwards of $400,000, meaning a rack can be work $3.5 to $5 million.
Claman said Accelsius is looking to create hybrid cooling infrastructure. The company has two products on the market, with its second product, a multirack 250 kilowatt two-phase coolant distribution unit, having launched a few weeks ago and is being provided to UT-Arlington's ARPA-E project.
"We're really confident the two-phase, direct-to-chip is going to be the technology that everyone centers on," Claman said. "So it's important that we get that sort of objective third party evaluation and experimentation. We want people to enter this market. We want to develop a global supply chain. We want to develop credibility around this technology. So for us, it was a really natural partnership. We really believe that if we're going to solve this issue around cooling chips, this is the sort of leading technology to get that done."
This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Austin-based Accelsius joins UT-Arlington data center cooling project