Founder buys company’s cool assets

Peter Hopton, original founder and chief technical officer of Iceotope, led a consortium to acquire the technology and the intellectual property of the company with the aim of rapidly taking the product to market.

Iceotope aims to reduce power consumption in data centres by tackling the problem of cooling servers at the source of the heat – at component level.

The company licenses this technology to suppliers to help them to reduce the cooling requirements in their servers and electronics.

The electronic components are sealed inside giant heat-pipes containing an ultra-convective fluid, so that all generated heat can be captured in water and efficiently removed, without heating up the surrounding data centre environment.

Mr Hopton appeared on Dragons’ Den in 2008 with his company VeryPC.

Although he failed to secure investment from the panel, he has now secured investment for Iceotope – originally a VeryPC spin-off – allowing him to take over as chief technical officer of the company while becoming the executive chairman at VeryPC.

He said: “With the data centre industry growing by 12 per cent each year, data centre providers are struggling to keep up with demand for higher efficiency and higher density, while keeping power consumption and costs to a minimum.”

He added: “Liquid cooling has safely been used for decades in data centres, Iceotope offers the next generation in liquid cooling to server operators.”