Iceotope raises $26M Series B as AI rack densities push past what air cooling can handle

Iceotope raises $26m as AI rack densities push past what air cooling can do

Barclays Climate Ventures and Two Seas Capital led the British precision-liquid-cooling company's Series B, with existing backers ABC Impact, Northern Gritstone, Edinv, and British Patient Capital all returning Iceotope, the British precision-liquid-cooling company, has closed a $26 million Series B round to expand its product line and patent portfolio as the AI hardware cycle pushes rack power densities past the point where air cooling can keep up. Two Seas Capital and Barclays Climate Ventures led the round, with existing backers Edinv, ABC Impact, Northern Gritstone, and British Patient Capital all participating again, the company said on Wednesday. The pitch is timing as much as technology. Next-generation Nvidia accelerator platforms are driving per-rack power densities toward and beyond 1 MW, a level at which both conventional air cooling and direct-to-chip liquid loops fail to remove heat fast enough to keep silicon at sustainable operating temperatures. Iceotope's approach, which the company calls chassis-based precision liquid cooling, replaces air with a dielectric fluid circulated directly around server components inside a sealed chassis, eliminating the fans, hot aisles, and water-intensive cooling towers that traditional data-centre architecture has relied on for decades. The market reading underneath the round is more striking than the round itself. Iceotope cited SemiAnalysis figures projecting that the installed base of liquid-cooled AI accelerators will grow from roughly 3 GW today to 40 GW within two years, a more-than-tenfold expansion driven by hyperscaler and colocation operators forced to adopt liquid cooling for AI workloads that conventional architectures cannot sustain. The thesis is becoming visible at the operator end of the stack as well: Nvidia-backed Firmus is building modular, fully liquid-cooled AI factories across Australia to host 36,000 GB300 Grace Blackwell chips, financed in part by a $10 billion Blackstone debt facility. Iceotope's commercial position rests on a 219-strong patent portfolio, granted and pending, and an early-mover claim on chassis-level liquid cooling that the company has been refining since 2005. The current product line includes KUL BOX, aimed at edge and AI deployments where space and noise constraints rule out conventional cooling, and KUL AI, designed for high-density rack deployments at the heart of new AI data centres. The technology can operate with near-silent operation and uses what the company describes as minimal water, which is the second part of the cooling story that has been drawing AI infrastructure money into the category: data-centre water draw has become a politically charged metric in jurisdictions including the US Southwest, Ireland, and the Netherlands. "Securing such high-caliber investors validates both our technology and our market timing," said Simon Jesenko, Iceotope's chief executive and chief financial officer. "We've spent years developing a robust, differentiated IP portfolio and products purpose-built for AI infrastructure, and we're ready to scale at precisely the moment the industry demands more advanced, sustainable cooling technology. The opportunity ahead, both directly with customers and through our partner ecosystem, is significant." Barclays Climate Ventures framed its participation in climate-policy terms. "With AI adoption rapidly increasing globally, Iceotope's liquid-cooling technology offers a timely and innovative solution to the mounting limitations of traditional cooling systems," said Steven Poulter, head of Barclays Climate Ventures. "Its approach not only meets the escalating demands of AI and high-performance computing but also materially advances datacenter sustainability." The competitive set is becoming crowded. LiquidStack, Submer, JetCool, GRC, and Asperitas are all targeting elements of the liquid-cooling stack, with the major hyperscalers, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta, each running internal cooling-architecture programmes alongside their external supplier roster. Iceotope's wedge is the chassis-level approach and the patent depth: the company has positioned itself as more deployable than open-bath immersion and more thermally capable than direct-to-chip cold-plate systems, with the second-largest IP portfolio in the precision-cooling category after Equinix. Iceotope previously raised £30 million ($38 million) in 2022, led by ABC Impact, and the Series B brings cumulative disclosed funding to comfortably over $80 million. The capital is earmarked for product and engineering, patent extension, and ecosystem partnerships rather than a step-change in headcount, which the company has been growing more steadily through 2025 and 2026.

Data center cooling tech startup Iceotope aims to scale after raising $26M - SiliconANGLE

Data center cooling tech startup Iceotope aims to scale after raising $26M Liquid cooling system startup Iceotope Technologies Ltd. said today it has closed on a $26 million Series B round of funding as it strives to accelerate the adoption of its data center-focused hardware. Two Seas Capital and Barclays Climate Ventures co-led the round, with participation from existing backers such as Edinv, ABC Impact, Northern Gritstone and British Patient Capital. The U.K.-based startup is trying to take advantage of the growing demand for alternative data center cooling technologies that promise more efficiency than the traditional air cooling and direct-to-chip liquid cooling systems widely used today. As artificial intelligence scales and spreads from the data center to the network edge, the challenge of cooling the graphics processing units and other chips that power it is becoming a critical problem. To solve it, Iceotope has developed a precision liquid cooling technology that enables AI systems to run at maximum power in any environment, with lower energy and water consumption than traditional cooling technologies. The startup is pioneering the concept of "direct-to-everything" liquid cooling, which is an alternative to traditional air-based cooling systems that promises to enable greater AI server density and power more advanced workloads. Its flagship products are a pair of rack-based integrated liquid cooling systems for high-density AI inference. Iceotope KUL AI is a data center-scale solution geared for rack deployments, while the Iceotope KUL BOX is a more compact offering designed for individual servers, making it suitable for edge workloads. According to Iceotope, both of its products are designed to operate in harsh and space-constrained environments. They use a non-flammable dielectric coolant instead of water that's piped around AI systems in order to absorb the heat generated by their components. The company is targeting a broad market, including cloud infrastructure providers and hyperscale data center operators, along with enterprises in the telecommunications and media industries, which increasingly require AI workloads to be processed on site. SemiAnalysis says the market Iceotope operates in is said to grow dramatically in the coming years. It projects the installed base for liquid-cooled AI accelerators to grow from around 3 gigawatts to more than 40 gigawatts within just two years, representing a more than 10 times increase in deployments. Iceotope's co-founder Simon Jesenko, who serves as both chief executive and chief financial officer, said today's round validates both the company's technology and the enormous demand for it. "We've spent years developing a robust, differentiated IP portfolio and products that are purpose-built for AI infrastructure, and we're ready to scale at precisely the moment the industry demands more advanced and sustainable cooling technology," he said. The startup will spend most of the funds from today's round on product development and engineering in order to expand its portfolio of patents and ecosystem partnerships, which are essential for bringing its technology to market. Steven Poulter of Barclays Climate Ventures said Iceotope has timed its rise perfectly, as data center operators are becoming increasingly worried about the limitations of traditional cooling systems. "It not only meets the escalating demands of AI and high-performance computing, but also materially advances data center sustainability," he said.