Nokia ties up with Innventure on 'groundbreaking' cooling tech

Nokia Bell Labs has apparently been developing what it calls "groundbreaking cooling technology for critical electronic equipment" for over a decade. Parent company Nokia is now looking to cash in.

With a view to commercializing the tech – the main target markets are data centers and mobile networks – Nokia has set up a new company with private Innventure, which specializes in disruptive tech investment.

Called Accelsius, the new company has acquired the rights to the cooling technology from Nokia and will be responsible for its further development and commercialization.

Figure 1: New company Accelsius will accelerate go-to-market of tech developed by Nokia Bell Labs.
(Source: Paweł Czerwiński on Unsplash)

There is believed to be a "sharing agreement" of some sort between Innventure and Nokia, allowing the Finnish supplier to financially benefit on the back of Accelsius growth.

No timetable has been publicly set for when the tech will see commercial light of day.

Sounds cool

Jukka Nihtila, Nokia's VP of patent transactions and external alliances, clearly has high hopes for Accelsius.

"By collaborating with Innventure," he asserted in prepared remarks, "our hugely versatile cooling technology can be offered to a broad range of companies in different industries to meet the challenge of heat densities in data centers and telecom networks while lowering energy consumption."

Expectations are high on Innventure's side, too. Founded in 2015, Innventure's self-stated mission is to launch new companies targeting $1 billion-plus potential enterprise value.

"This innovative technology [from Nokia Bell Labs] addresses an acute market need across the entire spectrum of networking and computing sites," said Bill Haskell, founder and CEO of Innventure.

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"It is positioned to disrupt the cooling industry as it exists today with flexible solutions that can be widely deployed for data centers and telecom."

The scalable cooling technology, according to the official statement, provides cooling direct to the chip or other heat sources. A passive two-stage coolant circulation process apparently enables "reliable, energy efficient heat transfer and dissipation from high density heat sources, without using pumps."

The collaboration between Nokia and Innventure follows the announcement in 2019 that the two companies would work together to commercialize Nokia's technology and intellectual property in areas beyond Nokia's core business.

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— Ken Wieland, contributing editor, special to Light Reading