Running a data center means finding innovative ways to manage heat from your servers. And French startup Qarnot is standardizing the process of reusing deadly heat and turning it into an asset.
The startup has been around for a while, but Qarnot now wants to reach the next level. It has raised a €12.5 million funding round (at current exchange rates he is $13.3 million). It also negotiated a €22.5 million ($24 million) line of credit to fund future projects.
Societe Generale Ventures, ADEME Investissement, Demeter, Banque des Territoires and Colam Impact are participating in today’s funding round.
Qarnot started with electric heaters for construction companies looking for heaters for new buildings. The company put the server in its heater so that the CPU and other components generate heat. The rest of the heater acts as a passive cooling system, warming your home or office building.
Meanwhile, companies such as BNP Paribas, Societe Generale, and 3D animation studio Illumination rent these servers for their needs. This is an innovative way to build distributed data centers.
“Ever since we launched Qarnot 12 years ago, our goal has been to assess lethal heat from computers. Today it’s a hot topic and a lot of people are talking about it.” co-founder and CEO Paul Benoit told me.
But the main problem with this system is that you don’t need a heater all year round. Qarnot found a way to combat this seasonality by building a new product called his system of scalable boilers.
These modules pack up to 12 servers in standard form factors based on the Open Compute Project server design with AMD Epyc and Intel Xeon CPUs. Each module is then connected to the water system and cold water enters the module and turns into hot water. Up to 95% of your computer’s waste heat is turned into hot water.
We asked about the seasonality of central heating boilers. And it turns out that the heating network works all year round. For example, to generate the hot water you need all the time.
“We want to work on baseload. We will operate year-round and the heating network will rely on free sources,” said Benoit. Buildings and areas use electricity or natural gas directly on cold winter nights.
Qarnot provides multiple modules and allows them to work in parallel. Produces more hot water and increases the total computing power of the Qarnot platform.
“The idea is that we should be able to deploy data centers where people consume heat.
Image credit: Garneau
Clients include social landlords, property developers, municipalities, swimming pools and heating network operators. Qarnot has already deployed a pilot data center with his 100kW computing power in Finland. Although this is a small data center, the company is already considering other locations where he has computing power from 500kW to several MW.
“With our system, we don’t need a cooling system, we can sell the heat generated from the servers. In the data center industry, if you have a server that needs 1 kW, you also need up to 500 W for air conditioning.” said Benoit.
And this is the key to understanding the appeal of Qarnot. From a business perspective, Qarnot uses electricity in two different ways. Running computers and selling heat contributes significantly to the company’s bottom line. From an environmental point of view, Qarnot significantly improves the carbon footprint of data centers.
“I think the future is going to look like a lot of medium-sized data centers. Edge computing is slowly coming up. We know there are operators looking for hundreds of data centers with
Qarnot has the potential to revolutionize the data center industry. If your company becomes wildly successful, there’s no reason to build a dedicated building to host hundreds of thousands of computers.
Image credit: Garneau
