Alloy Enterprises is an exciting new startup that’s bringing the concept of thermal management to hot properties. They’ve created innovative technology that takes massive sheets of copper and converts them into high-performance cooling plates for GPUs and peripheral chips. This innovation could not arrive at a more opportune time. Today, data centers are struggling with increasing power requirements with racks already reaching record levels of 480 kilowatts and projected to approach 600 kilowatts in the near future. The company’s solution not only tackles these challenges head-on but provides a groundbreaking advancement in thermal efficiency.
The cooling plates produced by Alloy Enterprises utilize an advanced additive manufacturing technique, enabling them to fit into tight spaces while maintaining durability under high pressure. This step alone increases their coolant flow capacity. Consequently, it dramatically improves the thermal performance of the systems it underlies. The company has stated that its cold plates demonstrate up to 35% improved thermal performance versus current competitors in the market.
Ali Forsyth, co-founder and CEO of Alloy Enterprises, illustrates how the technology is critical in our current data-heavy world. “We didn’t care too much about that 20% when racks were 120 kilowatts,” Forsyth stated. This statement emphasizes the reason for better cooling solutions as data center electricity use keeps skyrocketing.
Alloy Enterprises begins its manufacturing process by carefully prepping rolls of copper. Skilled workers would then cut the copper down to the exact dimensions required for production. While traditional manufacturing, like a cold plate, uses a machining process, Alloy uses an innovative manufacturing process called stack forging. This approach allows for the development of more granular features. They can be small, too, with some as small as 50 microns—roughly half the width of a human hair. Additionally, the company’s approach combines metal powders using a method known as sintering, resulting in solid and highly effective cooling plates.
Alloy Enterprises is ideally positioned within the industry. They are hands on working with all the industry heavyweights on the data center front although they have not shared who their specific partners are. This level of participation is further evidence of the widespread excitement around their groundbreaking cooling technology and the positive change it could bring to data center operations.
As data centers rapidly grow into massive power-hungry monsters, the urgency for efficient liquid cooling solutions will only grow. This means that engineers need to focus on the best ways to minimize heat production. Alloy Enterprises’ cold plates are uniquely engineered to address this critical need. Today, the company’s technology is commercially deployed in systems cooling IT data centers, buildings, vehicles, and more. This transition underscores an important trend towards more sustainable and efficient thermal management technologies.
The June announcement of Alloy Enterprises’ product was met with widespread enthusiasm from the tech community. In a subsequent article, Forsyth described the response as overwhelming—that “everything just blew up.” This enthusiasm reflects a growing recognition of the importance of thermal management in maintaining optimal performance within modern data centers.