Sponsor Editorial

While effective at bulk heat removal, traditional air and liquid cooling lacks the responsiveness and spatial granularity required to manage localized hotspots and rapid thermal fluctuations inherent to AI workloads. As a result, operators are forced to overprovision cooling capacity, throttle performance, or accept accelerated asset wear—trade-offs that constrain both economic and computational efficiency.

Phononic is breaking this paradigm. When Thermal Control Kits™ are deployed at critical hotspots across the entire data center, this thermoelectric (TEC)- enabled, software-defined control layer is capable of millisecond-scale cooling adjustments, a 600x improvement over legacy times. The seamless integration of Phononic’s Thermal Control Kits™ with system software and infrastructure management frameworks transforms cooling into a closed-loop optimization system—continuously balancing performance, power efficiency, and hardware longevity. 

When deployed at the heart of AI compute, Phononic’s Thermal Kits™ for GPU HBMs reduce thermal throttling, extend device useful life by up to 5x, improve PUE by up to 0.15, provide facility-wide energy savings of up to 14%, and deliver up to 3x return on investment. Data center operators can now mitigate thermal transients at the source, sustain peak GPU performance under burst workloads, reduce facility level power overhead, and extend asset life.