US electronics and connectivity manufacturer Molex has invested in early-stage technology company CAEPlus, which is developing active liquid-cooling technology for AI and high-performance computing, as rising workloads increase thermal demands in data centres.
The investment will accelerate development of CAEPlus’s BoundaryCool platform, an active liquid-cooling architecture designed to address the increasing heat generated by next-generation GPUs and application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs).
The companies said the collaboration would support the development and validation of the technology, which is designed to provide higher heat-transfer performance and reduce CPU, GPU and TPU temperatures compared with passive cold-plate solutions, while remaining compatible with existing data-centre architectures.
“Advanced thermal management is becoming a critical enabler for the next wave of compute performance,” said Jairo Guerrero, VP and GM, Copper Solutions Business, Molex. “Our strategic investment in CAEPlus reflects Molex’s commitment to supporting innovations in liquid cooling while working with emerging technology leaders to help customers address rapidly evolving AI and compute-intensive data center requirements.”
The investment reflects a growing challenge for data-centre operators and equipment manufacturers as increasingly powerful processors generate higher heat loads. Cooling has become a constraint on the deployment of high-performance computing infrastructure, particularly as AI workloads require greater processing density.
CAEPlus was established to develop active liquid-cooling technology aimed at this problem.
“CAEPlus was founded to address the rapid pace of change in data center cooling requirements by enabling an entirely new class of active liquid cooling solutions,” said Milad Bashirzadeh, founder and CEO of CAEPlus.
“In addition to its investment, Molex brings deep engineering expertise and a strong track record of helping scale innovative technologies. We are excited to work together in advancing our proprietary cooling technology and meet unrelenting industry requirements for higher levels of performance and efficiency.”
The BoundaryCool platform is intended to improve heat transfer at the processor level, with the companies targeting applications involving CPUs, GPUs and TPUs. Molex said the technology would complement its existing thermal-management portfolio as demand increases for cooling solutions capable of supporting more demanding computing architectures.
The agreement also gives Molex exclusive licensing rights to apply CAEPlus technology to its portfolio of pluggable I/O solutions.
That element of the deal extends the potential application of the technology beyond processor cooling. As data-centre computing and networking equipment becomes increasingly power-dense, thermal management is becoming an issue across a wider range of components.
Molex said the addition of CAEPlus technology would give customers a broader range of thermal-management solutions for demanding computing applications. Financial terms of the investment have not been disclosed.
The company is positioning the investment as part of a broader strategy around data-centre thermal management, rather than as a standalone investment in a cooling start-up.
For CAEPlus, meanwhile, Molex provides access to engineering expertise and an established route towards commercialisation.
The companies said they will now work on further development and validation of BoundaryCool, with the aim of addressing the thermal-management requirements of the next generation of AI and HPC infrastructure.
