Q&A: Tina Tosukhowong, Investment Director at TDK Ventures

As data centres face growing thermal management challenges, there is a greater need for innovative cooling technologies. 

Within the sector, cooling solutions can help to prolong the life of IT infrastructure, keep essential systems from overheating and maintain optimum performance within the facility. During a time where AI is becoming more popular, such cooling systems are vital to keep energy consumption as low as possible.

Data Centre Magazine speaks with Tina Tosukhowong, Investment Director at TDK Ventures, as she shares her expertise on data centre cooling innovations amidst increasing computational demands. She discusses the transition from traditional air cooling to advanced liquid cooling solutions, emphasising the urgent need for innovative cooling technologies and how TDK Ventures seeks to invest in startups to develop these solutions.

Please introduce yourself and your role at TDK Ventures.

My name is Tina Tosukhowong. I’m the Investment Director at TDK Ventures covering climate tech and advanced materials investment.

I have a PhD in Chemical Engineering from Georgia Tech. I spent about a decade in the industry from petrochemical to industrial biotech startup scaling the technology from lab to commercial plant. After my previous biotech startup was acquired, I started to get into venture investments focusing on climate tech and advanced materials.

As an Investment Director at TDK Ventures, I develop an investment thesis to solve the world’s most pressing needs in various areas, such as decarbonising industrial sectors, electrification, etc. I identify startups working to solve these problems, conduct due diligence. Once the investment has been made, I typically serve on the board of directors of the portfolio companies to help them along their commercialisation journey.

Tell us about some of the latest innovations within the data centre cooling industry.

Ever since the launch of the GPT-4 large language model, the need for computational power has never been higher. The new GPU and CPU chips are extremely power hungry. 40% of the power consumption in the data centre goes to cooling these chips. 

However, we are reaching the limit that the air cooling can cool the chips. As the total design power of the chip goes up, we need to transition to liquid cooling. We have seen innovations to address this issue by both active cooling and passive cooling solutions.

For active cooling, we have seen immersion cooling in the market for a while, but it also comes with the drawbacks of having to submerge the entire servers into the cooling liquid. We have seen alternative “Direct-to-Chip (D2C)” cooling solutions, which are cold plates delivering closed-loop coolant to the top of the chip. 

The newer D2C cooling solution is sophisticated with microchannel or microjet structures designed with proprietary algorithms to deliver highest cooling flux to the hottest spot on the chip and deliver much higher performance than immersion cooling or straight-channel cold plates.

In the passive cooling space, we are also seeing startups working to improve Thermal Interface Materials (TIM1 and TIM1.5) to have much lower thermal resistance and be able to export heat from the chip out to the heat sink more effectively. Some have come up with very clever innovations, such as having a z-directional aligned material that enhances the heat transport into z-direction to the heat sink. 

What challenges do you face in the data centre sector and how do you manage them?

In general, liquid cooling is not something that can be easily retrofitted for every data centre. The plumbing, the handling of the liquid, leak detection, leak prevention and maintenance are some of the challenges. 

Many hyperscalers, and other types of data centres are currently working closely with startups to test the solutions. The regulations in various geographies are also driving better energy efficiency and lower cooling water consumption in the data centre, so the entire industry needs to work together to adopt liquid cooling technology because it can help reduce the overall cooling water consumption.

What does the future hold for advanced liquid cooling technologies?

There is a lot of potential for startups innovating direct-to-chip cooling solutions. How to design it to be leak-proof and have the lowest thermal resistance at the hot spot is the imminent problem. In the future, the chip might need to pack even higher computational power and they may be vertically stacked on one another. In that case, an even more sophisticated direct-to-chip liquid cooling solution will have to evolve to meet the future demand of the chip. I don’t think there is a winning solution yet. 

The race has just begun. At TDK Ventures, we would like to invest in innovative startup companies working on active or passive chip cooling. The need to address this is very high.

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