Corintis raises USD $24M for AI chip cooling with Microsoft
Corintis has secured USD $24 million in Series A funding following a chip cooling breakthrough in collaboration with Microsoft aimed at addressing a key challenge in artificial intelligence (AI) data centres.
Chip cooling bottlenecks
The rapid expansion of AI workloads has placed increasing demands on computational hardware, leading to greater heat output from chips. Efficient cooling methods are seen as essential to maintaining performance and reliability as power requirements for modern AI accelerators continue to multiply. High-powered chips, such as those used in the early versions of OpenAI's ChatGPT, initially operated on 400-watt GPUs. Recent advancements have pushed requirements much higher, with projections indicating a tenfold increase in power consumption, prompting market leaders such as NVIDIA to move towards liquid cooling for data centre GPUs.
Corintis' latest funding round was led by BlueYard Capital and included participation from Founderful, Acequia Capital, Celsius Industries and XTX Ventures. The company has now raised a total of USD $33.4 million and plans to expand operations in both Europe and the United States to better serve a growing base of American customers.
Microsoft partnership and technical breakthrough
As part of its work with several major technology companies, Corintis recently partnered with Microsoft to test microfluidic cooling technologies. According to Microsoft, the companies achieved a significant increase in cooling efficiency for AI chips, outstripping current standards. Microsoft stated that tests with Corintis developed systems demonstrated the ability to remove heat three times more effectively than the most widely used technology 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 thermal limitations of stacking high power SOC's without inner layer cooling." said Husam Alissa, director of systems technology in Cloud Operations and Innovation at Microsoft on the recent breakthrough.
Corintis' approach is rooted in microfluidic cooling, based on designs optimised for each chip. Instead of conventional designs where copper blocks are carved into simple fins, Corintis uses complex networks of micro-scale channels adapted precisely to a chip's architecture to direct coolant to critical regions.
Remco van Erp, Co-Founder & CEO of Corintis, said: "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."
Van Erp also highlighted the operational challenges for engineers responsible for thermal management in data centres and pointed to the company's ambition, stating, "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. As our recent collaboration with Microsoft highlights, there's an industry-wide push to advance the limits of cooling to enable a future of compute that's not limited by heat."
Industry board appointments and investor perspectives
The Series A round also brings in high-profile board members, including Lip-Bu Tan, chairman of Walden International and CEO of Intel, and Geoff Lyon, former CEO and founder of CoolIT. Lip-Bu Tan has also made a personal investment in Corintis. He commented on the importance of the technology:
"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, addressed the wider relevance of advanced cooling in AI hardware development:
"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."
Scaling production and future plans
Since its founding in 2022, Corintis has manufactured over 10,000 microfluidic cooling plates and is in the process of scaling its manufacturing capacity to produce more than one million units per year by 2026. The company's revenue has already reached the eight-digit mark, with expectations of a tenfold increase alongside further customer deployments.
Corintis also plans to grow its workforce from 55 to over 70 employees by the end of the year and will open additional US offices as well as an engineering site in Munich, Germany, to support further expansion.
Current platforms in development by Corintis include Glacierware, which automates cooling system design, and Therminator, which allows chip companies to physically emulate advanced cooling on silicon test chips before full-scale production. These technologies are also intended to address ecological concerns, such as reducing water consumption in data centres.
The company was co-founded by Dr Remco van Erp (CEO), Sam Harrison (COO) and Prof Elison Matioli (Scientific Adviser), and is based on research from the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland.
