 Welcome to JSA TV and JSA Podcasts, the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Jean-Marc Limer and joining me today from the Netherlands is Michael Bourichius, Chief Commercial Officer at the Immersion Computing Company, Esperitus. Mikkel, it's welcome to JSA. It's a pleasure speaking to you. I saw you a few months ago, but so much has changed in Europe and the markets over the last six months. First, how have you been? And my first actual question is, what's your view of the current state of the European market? Yeah, good to see you as well again. It has been a while and it's nice to meet you regularly and we do so. And no, yeah, we have been doing great. 2022 was already quite an interesting year for immersion cooling in general. We have seen a lot of movements, developments in the space and projects picking up. The demand is there. The real driver for offering solutions to facilitate any form of high performance computing is very strong now. So I think the acceptance for immersion cooling this year was really established and we have a lot of expectations. Of course, for the next few years, if we see the research, then it really looks like liquid cooling adoption is really growing. And we also see within the liquid cooling users already that they stick with the technology of choice, right? So they expand within liquid cooling and up to 60% or so of their environment in the next few years. So that brings a lot of expectations for us as a solution provider. The balance between performance and sustainability is our sweet spot and for all of the enterprise users as well. So I think it's going to be quite exciting. It's definitely a technology that's changing their centers and their center design and that's the deployment. Maybe just to give a bit of an idea of what immersion cooling is just in case some of our listeners don't know immersion cooling. Can you just give a general overview of what is immersion cooling? Yeah, sure. So I mean, we all know data centers as being air cooled, right? And that has been done quite well in the recent years, relatively, of course. But there's an urgency to cool higher density servers, higher thermal design power chips and more within the same facility. So there's a real demand for advanced cooling in general. So within advanced cooling, it's liquid cooling that's now the next phase for data centers, right? And we have seen liquid cooling in supercomputers over the last decade or so, especially direct on the chip cooling to cool, for example, a CPU or GPU specifically. With immersion cooling, we fully immerse a piece of hardware, a server within a dielectric fluid, including all of the components. So that's already one advantage you take away all of the heat generated by all of the components in a server, not only the chip or the GPU. So it has a very efficient heat transfer and that brings a lot of benefits for data centers. The solution is very different than air cooled. Those are not vertical racks, but horizontal tanks as the industry calls them with a lot of fluids, but also a lot of hardware and that's the advantage. It's something quite amazing to see. I remember when you unveiled your first, I don't remember the name of the actual product, but I'm going to call it the cube, the arc. We call it the AC24. I would never guess that. But it's quite amazing to see all that technology. I'm going to call it water, but inside the liquids, with all the liquid around, which is actually safe to put your hand inside as well. That's the other thing. When you look at it, people think I shouldn't touch this and it's kind of okay to do it. So it was quite an amazing thing to watch. But I was going to ask as well, because you mentioned use cases. So what are the best use cases for this? I think it's a beauty being one of the big ones, I guess, because that's where a lot of power density exists. But talk us through some use cases and for instance, even disparate experience, how the company was starting to kind of serve tech in ships. Is that a use case for immersion computing as well? Right, yes. It's nice that you mentioned that. We started out with basically developing this type of technology, the concept for ocean going vessels, it's a very challenging environment to call electronics just in general. We later realized that there was 2015. There's a real problem to solve in traditional data centers. And that's also the background of the team. So it was a very, I think, logical move, actually, where we saw our room to innovate when we started was the enterprise users within data centers, right? Both with single tenant owned data centers or in co-location. But we thought that would be actually a great space to be in. And I think recently a lot of very clear numbers from that segment came out. I think even the other day, I saw a piece of research mentioning more than 16,000 enterprise data centers in Europe alone. And so that's a very large number. And in terms of energy efficiency, they do not really do a good job, right? The periods of those environments, and those are usually small environments or dated, they're really going through the roof. So that's one use case, right? I mean, it's probably a little bit the elephant in the room because nobody sees that elephant. But there are a lot of data centers beyond co-location, which can do a much better job. And that's very easy with immersion cooling, right? From day one, you save the fan energy, for example. So that's 10 up to 20% of server power you don't use anymore. Nowadays, that's also a great business case, right? But you mentioned supercomputing. We see that early adopters for this type of technology are what we call high-performance computing users, right? But not usually in research institutes or public institutes where that would be the first vote as well, but especially from the enterprise segment. So one of our first customers is a bank based in France, a global player. They have been exploring advanced cooling solutions for probably the last two, three years. They have chosen immersion cooling to scale up both their locations with our technology. That's a typical use case, I would say. That's a user with a mix of applications, but owned data centers, very driven by sustainability. So talking about use case, we are very much focused on Europe because there's a strong demand to find this balance for performance and sustainability. And we see that within our early adopters. And they come from different backgrounds. So far, we have served customers from the telcospace, co-location, cloud, high-performance computing, all kinds, but they have drive for performance and sustainability in common. So that's, I would say, the major use case there. That's very interesting, especially the banking example because when we think of immersion computing and cooling, we just think about HPC. We don't think about the everyday use case like a bank or a car manufacturer using those things. I mean, even the beauty industry is moving so heavily into this. They have to simulate all the things when they produce new products, which is very interesting. So my question then becomes, of course, we've already mentioned a little bit of what asperity does, but so what's asperity is working on right now to address the near and long-term demand of what's coming because this is only going to get bigger. It's not going to go anywhere for the next few decades. Yeah, that's true. So maybe to talk about that a little bit, we see indeed that the market is really getting there in the next five years, right? Really double-digit growth in a year-on-year in the next five years. And as I said, like we see that within users that already are on liquid cooling, they stay there, right? So don't go back to another form of cooling or traditional air-based cooling. So that expansion within existing users is quite ambitious. And as well, what we have seen compared to the last few years is that, of course, there was a lot of focus on exploring and learning about the technology, pilot projects, and so on. But those are the years now that are coming up where those pilot projects actually become real-scale-up and scale-out projects, right? So we see a lot of variations really deploying a full facility or at least a good part of it. So we see also a change in terms of users with one or two systems moving to multiple systems, tens, even hundreds of systems. And that's a very different way of looking at a user, of course. And that means that the user is very looking different at the product. You can imagine it's different to look at a full system or one standalone system, and we have done both, right, so far. So for us, the focus in the next two years will be, well, two-fold, I would say. I mean, we see that this is a new technology. So we realize that we need to support our users throughout the full journey. Very early on to educate them about the technology, to help them building the business case, and so on, right, an adoption plan. So we are there to help with services and support. So that definitely has our focus. We don't want to be only an hardware provider and leave users alone while they are figuring it out. We realize this is something new with great benefits, but to achieve those benefits, it's better to use an expert like ourselves. And secondly, it's our goal as an immersion cooling provider. I mean, at the end of the day, we are a technology provider. And the reason an immersion cooling provider exists is we have a job to do, and that's cool IT. And so what we do is follow the OEM roadmaps from all of the chip manufacturers very closely. And that looks very ambitious in the next few years, where when we started out, 150 watt chip was already, yeah, was a top performer, right, in their portfolio. And we move now to portfolio in the next few years up to 1,000 watts per GPU. So that's a very different ball game. And it's our job to keep up, right? So that's our, I would say, innovation focus to stay on that OEM roadmap and help them as well, basically serving their users, right? Yeah. I was just thinking as well, because the whole story here is around sustainability and how green this technology is versus just air cooling. Yeah. What happens at the end of the life cycle of the product itself? Does it go through recycling? Can it be retrofitted into something else? Yeah, it's a really good question. We actually recently did a piece of research where we asked liquid cooling users which kind of metrics they are using to track their sustainability performance, right? And circularity was, I believe, in the top, well, at least top eight or so. I think closer to the top five on top of my head. And I think this question fits in that topic, right? Circularity, how do you recycle or what's the end of life treatment, right? So in immersion cooling, there are different components. Of course, you have the IT that has been immersed. You have the tank itself, which is a real good piece of hardware. And there's the fluid, of course, as well. So they have different characteristics. There should be different approaches to it. But at the end of the day, we'll be looking at making that a good story for the user, right? Today, it's not urgent, I would say, because it's all early deployments. And the lifetime, for example, of a solution we provide is at least multiple hardware generations of IT, right? So there's time to build this facility for users. But it's interesting that you ask about it because it's definitely a question that comes up. And even probably more so because of the green and sustainable reputation of the technology of immersion cooling. You see a bit more ambitious questions and objectives to it within our users as well. Only one of them, like heat reuse, for example, is another one that's really close to this technology and definitely on the radar for our users. Well, because even for your customers, for them to get financing from their own investors, they have to explain the entire life cycle of everything they do. So it's becoming very exciting to see this circle economy mentality taking over. Yeah, I think in general, that's a great opportunity for a lot of stakeholders. Yeah. And then I was going to ask, because I mean, we are at the end of 2022. So the guidebook tells us that we need to ask questions about 2023 and predictions. So what's your predictions for next year? What's going to happen in 2023 that you're looking forward to? Yeah, well, I mean, some of them are predictions, as I said, we follow just the OEMs, right? So in that way, we're a little bit a trend follower. And I think it's very exciting what's happening in the compute, let's call it arena, right? We see great battles between the different providers. And I think that leads to very exciting innovations. So that's really good to see. That means there is a job for us to do, but very excited to follow that. Yeah, we expect a lot from, again, from finding the balance between sustainability and performance. So I think now sustainability is, and at some point we should probably drop that, even that term sustainability, I think will be much more specific as an industry of what it actually means, right? And because it includes, for example, challenges on water usage. Yeah, I think that's really became in the spotlight in the last year or so. Heat reuse that's moving from a nice to have, to a demand and requirement in certain regions. So that's something we will follow very closely. So I think that will be more on top of the agenda. And of course the energy crisis in Europe, for example, is really driving this as well. The business case for energy efficiency has drastically improved. So, yeah, that's, I mean, yeah, it's almost not a prediction. You can draw the map, I think, for the next few years if it comes to that. From us as a provider, I think you will see a lot of exciting stuff from us, including large scale projects. So some of the projects we are working on now for a while, those are long-term projects, but also large scale. So I think what you can expect from immersion cooling in general is seeing large scale projects in data centers as we actually know them, not somewhere hidden in the corner in a niche, but really large scale new green field data centers in one of the top hubs like Amsterdam or Frankfurt. And that's going to bring immersion cooling to the next phase. So, yeah, and we hope to see projects where immersion cooling is a part of the solution for heat reuse, right? I mean, let's mention that, let's make that a goal, not a prediction for 23 as an industry. I think it's a great loss to see energy being lost every day. And it can be optimally used, right? We all know that, very difficult to do with a little bit warm air, but with, I would say, water on high temperatures like we provide, then I think this becomes a really feasible case. So, yeah, that's, I think it's exciting to see what's going to happen in the next few years, yeah. It's safe to say we are upon the golden age of immersion cooling. Yeah, I think it's a real solution to various problems we see there and it's offering paints and a solution to paints and as well offering some real gains, right, to do more. I mean, there's a real demand for a compute, advanced compute as well. We all want it, but let's make sure that... And we need it. Yeah, exactly. That we can facilitate this growth in a sustainable manner, right? Not just by doing the same like we did in the last 10 years. Okay. And then, so if people want to find out more about immersion cooling asperities and reach out, where can people go to? Yeah, of course asperities.com and we have a great blog to with a little bit more in-depth articles on the technology and collaborations we build. We have also some great video library, so to learn more about the technology and frequent ask questions sessions and so on. And of course, yeah, for instance parties, I mean, happy to welcome everyone in Amsterdam to show the technology. And that's, I think, the great experience because you need to see and feel it and, yeah, to really understand it and start building the case. Yeah. And it is quite amazing when you see those lights in the water. Yeah. It's not water, but you know what I mean. Yeah, the fluid. Yeah. It's quite amazing to see that. Yeah, your mind says water when you see it. Yeah, well, the mind just goes into, for a few seconds, just goes into a shock. It's like, you can't have that in there. Yeah, exactly. But all right, Mikkel, thank you so much for talking to me. As for our viewers, thank you so much for tuning into JSA TV and JSA Podcasts. And don't forget to check out our social channels for more content. Until next time, happy networking.