Company acquires privately held JetCool for undisclosed terms to bolster IT cooling business.
12:41 PT: This article was changed to include new images.
Data center cooling is hot. At least it’s becoming a hot market, with industry projections likely to increase as the Nvidia Blackwell GPU push increases the percentage of silicon that requires liquid cooling. Goldman Sachs estimates the server cooling market is expected to grow at a 60.7% compound annual rate from $4.1 billion in 2024 to $10.6 billion in 2026.
This demand has caught the attention of many investors and large IT infrastructure companies, including Flex, the end-to-end manufacturing partner of leading data centers. Flex recently acquired privately held JetCool to help bolster its ability to add liquid cooling solutions to its existing IT infrastructure, power distribution and management offerings. Let’s take a look
JetCool MicroConvective Cooling
Flex believes JetCool’s patented microconvective cooling solution produces an order of magnitude improvement in heat transfer relative to traditional microchannel cold plates that pass fluid over a surface. JetCool’s solution uses arrays of fluid jets that route liquid directly at the chip surface. The result is that JetCool could become the preferred cooling technology for platforms like Nvidia Blackwell servers. JetCool already has a partnership with Dell and provides cooling for select PowerEdge servers, handling the most demanding workloads, cooling up to 1200W, reducing fan speed by 50%, trimming energy usage by up to 4kW per rack and reducing noise pollution by 13dB.
I had the chance to discuss the trend to liquid-based cooling solutions with Rob Campbell, President of Communications, Enterprise & Cloud solutions at Flex. He said the company evaluated some 74 companies as it considered investing in this fast-growing market, and felt that JetCool was far and away the best candidate for partnering leading eventually to an acquisition. JetCool had the technology, and Flex can now provide the resources, supply chain, and manufacturing expertise to scale that business to meet the exploding demand from data center customers.
JetCool products include fully sealed cold plates and direct liquid-to-chip with turn-key microconvective cooling systems. These include cold plates for H100 PCIe cards, the next generation of AI accelerators, and the upcoming SmartLid that targets hot spots with fluid-to-die cooling.
JetCool provides three approaches to cooling powerful semiconductors up to 1500 watts, with a roadmap that extends beyond 3200 watts. The company recently announced a Coolant Distribution Unit (CDU) that provides precise cooling for racks up to 300kW and is scalable to row-based configurations for over 2MW of cooling capacity.
Conclusions
The data center cooling market is quite fragmented with many small and large players, and Flex is well positioned to extend its existing relationships with both the hyperscalers and the OEM/ODMs whose platforms will increasingly demand liquid cooling. JetCool seems to have some of the best cooling technology, and its acquisition by Flex should provide the scale needed to meet market demand.
Disclosures: This article expresses the author’s opinions and should not be taken as advice to purchase from or invest in the companies mentioned. Cambrian-AI Research is fortunate to have many, if not most, semiconductor firms as our clients, including Blaize, BrainChip, Cadence Design, Cerebras, D-Matrix, Eliyan, Esperanto, Flex, GML, Groq, IBM, Intel, NVIDIA, Qualcomm Technologies, Si-Five, SiMa.ai, Synopsys, Ventana Microsystems, Tenstorrent and scores of investment clients. We have no investment positions in any of the companies mentioned in this article and do not plan to initiate any in the near future. For more information, please visit our website at
