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July 18, 2024—In 2024, the Wells Fargo Innovation Incubator (IN2) celebrates its 10th anniversary under the management of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s (NREL’s) Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center. As part of the 10-year celebration, NREL is looking back at IN2’s inaugural cohort to see how the companies have progressed over the last decade.
Early in its history, LiquidCool Solutions went by the name Hardcore Computer. The first systems the startup built were high-performance gaming systems, thus the original name.
“If you could cool the Ferraris of computing and do it with a liquid, we’d get a little bit of the wow factor,” said David Roe, LiquidCool program manager.
However, the startup had to change its name for a very important reason. “We couldn’t get through spam filters at many of the large companies,” said Herb Zien, former chief executive officer and now vice chairman of LiquidCool.
LiquidCool uses an electrically nonconductive heat-transfer fluid to cool down electronics, often in data centers. Traditionally those centers were cooled with air, but as chips get stronger to manage artificial intelligence and machine learning, they also get much hotter.
“It’s been known for decades that you can cool certain electronics using a fluid,” Roe said. “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.”
Learn more about LiquidCool’s unique solution and read the full story on NREL.gov.
