Qarnot Computing announces that it has completed a financing round of 35 million euros with Société Générale, Demeter, ADEME Investissement, Colam Impact and Banque des Territoires on behalf of the State as part of the France 2030 program.
The start-up proposes to heat buildings using residual energy from data centers, and now intends to “massify” this process on a larger scale. With this round table, the French company is emphasizing its next-generation datacenters, based on its direct water cooling technology.
Since its creation in 2010, Qarnot has offered both computing power, while taking advantage of the energy emitted to heat buildings. The start-up released its first models of computer radiators in 2013, then completed its infrastructure over the years with digital boilers and computer-based warehouse heating systems.
Qarnot targets large heat consumers
After deploying more than 100 digital boilers and making more than 70,000 high-performance computing cores available in cloud mode, Qarnot is thinking bigger. In the new generation data centers that Qarnot wishes to deploy, the IT infrastructures will be “directly installed on sites that consume large amounts of heat”, such as heating networks, swimming pools or industrial sites.
Qarnot plans to deploy data centers in France and Europe, ranging from “several hundred kW to a few MW”.
The start-up introduces a module called QBx, which is equivalent to a computer bay. The company intends to use direct water cooling technology to “densify high-performance servers and processors while optimizing their cooling,” it said in a press release. This method would thus make it possible to recover 95% of the waste heat emitted by the servers, by producing water at more than 60°C through the QBx, explains Qarnot.
50 new recruits in the pipeline
This fundraising comes as major technology companies are taking the measure of the climate emergency and starting to innovate in this area, particularly in Northern Europe.
To support its growth, Qarnot announces the recruitment of more than 50 people, mainly for technical and commercial positions.
“With the entry of these major investors, we are crossing a milestone in our history and clearly aiming for large-scale industrial development,” commented Paul Benoit, president and co-founder of Qarnot.