THE AI INTERVIEW
“ When I joined the company, we pivoted out of crypto – it was just too volatile and I didn’ t want the company to be pegged to the price of Bitcoin.”
The reason the cryptocurrency heritage has proved invaluable, is because it’ s helped in understanding high-performance computing demands.
“ We have a really close relationship with the chip manufacturers and semiconductor manufacturers dating back to the start of the company,” Joe explains.
We understand the hardware and chipsets. Not every company that we compete with understands what happens inside the server.
“ Five to 10 years ago, a large liquid cooling project might be five megawatts or maybe 10 megawatts,” he says.
“ The last project that we won was 150 megawatts.”
The science behind the solution Liquid Stack’ s approach centres on what the CEO describes as“ two-phase liquid immersion cooling”: a technology that harnesses phase change to achieve dramatic efficiency improvements.
His explanation employs an unexpected analogy:“ I have a border terrier who gets really hot in the summer because he’ s got a double wiry coat.
“ Dogs don’ t have pores like we do, so they have to reject their heat through their tongue, using the evaporation of saliva going from liquid to gas. That’ s about 4,000 times more efficient than air cooling.”
In other words, efficiency advantage becomes crucial as environmental concerns mount.
“ When we roll out of bed every day, all we do is liquid cooling. A lot of our competitors have hundreds or even thousands of products, and cooling is just one of the things they do”
Joe Capes, CEO, Liquid Stack
In the US alone, data centres will consume approximately 600 billion litres of water this year to reject heat.
“ It’ s a massive issue,” Joe observes,“ I was just in London a couple of weeks ago and the weather was wonderful, but it was really dry – like a drought.
“ Weather patterns are changing, it’ s getting hotter – and the severity of weather changes are greater.”
This means that the environmental imperative has converged with economic necessity.
At Nvidia’ s GTC conference in March, the company announced 600-kilowatt racks – a staggering leap from the six to 10 kilowatts once considered standard.“ It’ s a massive order of magnitude increase in power density,” Joe says.
28 September 2025