As demand for more powerful AI models and high-performance computing continues to soar, the energy consumption and thermal management of advanced chips have become major bottlenecks. Semiconductor cooling startup Corintis has stepped into the spotlight, announcing a $24 million Series A funding round alongside a landmark collaboration with Microsoft to pioneer next-generation chip cooling technologies.
The growing AI cooling challenge
The pace of AI development is accelerating at an extraordinary rate. Just a few years ago, the early versions of OpenAI’s ChatGPT were trained on NVIDIA GPUs consuming around 400 watts of power. Today, new GPUs and AI accelerators are already pushing power requirements towards 4,000 watts per chip, an increase of more than tenfold in under five years.
This exponential growth has created a pressing need for liquid cooling solutions in data centres. Conventional air cooling is no longer sufficient, and even traditional liquid cooling systems are struggling to cope with the heat generated by the latest chips. Industry leaders such as NVIDIA have already adopted liquid cooling for their data centre GPUs, signalling a sector-wide shift towards more advanced thermal management strategies.
Corintis emerges with $24M Series A funding
To address this bottleneck, Corintis has officially emerged from stealth mode with $24M in Series A funding, led by BlueYard Capital with participation from Founderful, Acequia Capital, Celsius Industries, XTX Ventures, and others.
This round brings the company’s total funding to $33.4M and will be used to expand operations with new offices in the US and an engineering hub in Munich, Germany. Corintis has also strengthened its leadership team with high-profile board members, including:
- Lip-Bu Tan, Chairman of Walden International and former Intel CEO.
- Geoff Lyon, founder and former CEO of CoolIT Systems.
Their combined expertise bridges semiconductor design, manufacturing, and advanced chip cooling, underscoring Corintis’ ambition to become a leader in next-generation microfluidic cooling solutions.
Microsoft partnership: a breakthrough in In-Chip microfluidic cooling
Corintis’ most significant announcement is its collaboration with Microsoft, which has already achieved a major breakthrough in in-chip microfluidic cooling technology.
In recent tests, Microsoft and Corintis successfully embedded microfluidic cooling channels directly into the chip, enabling heat to be removed at three times the efficiency of today’s most advanced liquid cooling systems. According to Husam Alissa, Director of Systems Technology at Microsoft Cloud Operations and Innovation, this innovation not only improves thermal margins but also:
- Unlocks greater performance and overclocking potential.
- Enables new 3D chip architectures previously impossible due to thermal constraints.
- Reduces the environmental footprint of data centre cooling by lowering water consumption.
This collaboration positions Corintis and Microsoft at the cutting edge of semiconductor thermal management for AI and cloud computing.
Microfluidic cooling: redefining thermal management
At the heart of Corintis’ innovation is microfluidic cooling, a process that optimises the flow of liquid through microscale channels within or adjacent to chips. Unlike conventional cooling solutions that rely on generic copper fins or external cold plates, Corintis designs chip-specific cooling systems tailored to each architecture.
This approach allows coolant to target the hottest regions of the chip, maximising efficiency and minimising the risk of thermal throttling or chip failure. As CEO and Co-Founder Dr Remco van Erp explains: “Every chip is unique. Cooling today is not adapted to the chip. Our mission is to unlock 10x better cooling performance, enabling the future of compute without being constrained by heat.”
Bridging semiconductor and cooling design
Corintis has developed a comprehensive platform to make chip-cooling co-design a core part of semiconductor development. Key innovations include:
- Glacierware – simulation and optimisation software to automate cooling system design.
- Copper microfluidic manufacturing facility – capable of producing cold plates with microscale features thinner than a human hair.
- Therminator platform – allowing chipmakers to emulate next-gen chip designs on silicon test chips with millimetre-level accuracy.
Together, these tools enable Corintis to deliver drop-in replacements for existing liquid cooling systems, or co-packaged cooling integrated directly with chips, achieving up to an order-of-magnitude performance increase.
Scaling for the AI era
Since its founding at the Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, Corintis has already manufactured more than 10,000 cooling systems, deployed in leading-edge data centres. The company has reached 8-digit cumulative revenue and is on track to expand production capacity to over 1 million microfluidic cold plates annually by 2026.
Its current workforce of 55 employees will grow to more than 70 by the end of 2025, as Corintis accelerates its manufacturing and R&D efforts.
Industry impact and the future of compute
The stakes are high. As AI workloads scale across industries—from cloud computing and generative AI to scientific research and digital construction modelling—the ability to efficiently manage chip thermals will determine the pace of innovation.
David Byrd, General Partner at BlueYard Capital, summarised it best: “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.”
By integrating cooling directly into chip design, Corintis is positioning itself not just as a cooling solutions provider, but as an enabler of the next era of computing.
As AI systems continue to scale, the future of computing will depend not just on faster and smarter chips, but on keeping them cool. With its breakthrough technologies and strategic partnerships, Corintis is set to play a decisive role in overcoming AI’s thermal bottleneck.
Read next: Accelerating UK semiconductor innovation – Build in Digital
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