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We founded Qarnot Computing in 2010, naming it after the eighteenth-century French physicist Sadi Carnot, who defined the principles of thermodynamics. We introduced the letter Q, referencing the symbol for heat in physics.
Our vision from the outset was to consider massive heat generated from data centres not as waste, but as a valuable product. Exploring ways to recover and exploit this energy has involved bucking the trend. That is where Eureka has proven invaluable, supporting us as we took progressive risks towards achieving our goal and designing Qarnot Computing’s value proposition.
Eureka helped us secure national funding in 2013 and 2016, enabling us to combine our expertise in high performance computing with Czech electronics specialist Papouch and Slovak manufacturer SKL Cuting. The international partnership was key to developing efficient waste heat recovery technologies and leveraging funding beyond our home market of France.
Although we recently discontinued our initial radiator, it laid the foundations for the modules we use today by demonstrating our capacity to deploy distributed computing infrastructure where heat is needed. The high-performance computing clusters can produce kilowatts of computing power and release the corresponding heat into aluminium cold plates. Up to 96% of the heat is then transferred to a system that warms water for district heating or pools, for example. These modules recover thermal energy at temperatures of up to 65 degrees Celsius and feed it into the grid to heat cities, avoiding CO2 emissions that would have resulted from both data centre cooling and heat energy production.
With this differentiating technology bootstrapped through Eureka projects, Qarnot Computing has scaled up. The early research and development helped us catch the eye of the European Innovation Council in June 2022, which launched Qarnot into a 2.5 million euro Accelerator project. We have attracted several rounds of private investment, and we are proud to say that all our equity and infrastructure are exclusively in Europe, allowing us to offer European data and cloud sovereignty to our clients.
Our collaboration with Eureka has been essential to the growth of our deep tech startup as we set out to disrupt global markets.
We are matching our cloud computing clients to heating needs. So far, we have opened several sites across Europe, mainly in France but also in Finland and, more recently, in Italy.
Our business is now growing: we provide seamless high performance computing cloud services and clusters to companies active in cutting-edge and strategic European domains such as the space, energy, aeronautics, electronics and automotive industries. Our services allow our clients to focus on research and development whilst we handle the IT complexity.
Our mission is to secure the future of high-performance computing whilst transforming the approach data centres take to energy. This is a critical challenge as artificial intelligence, and other disruptive trends upturn the industrial and societal landscape.
We believe Qarnot Computing is an example of how incentivising local innovation can contribute to solving major global challenges. As a growing network of innovators around the world, perhaps each of us can exceed our maximum efficiency through cooperation and, like heat from data centres, ensure no knowledge or expertise goes to waste.
Programme: Eurostars
Project participants: Qarnot Computing (France) and Papouch (Czech Republic)
Project duration: 2014-2015
Project cost (on application): 900,000 euro
Programme: Eurostars
Project participants: Qarnot Computing (France) and SKL Cuting (Slovakia)
Project duration: 2017-2019
Project cost (on application): 1 million euro
Sectors: ICT and digital technologies; energy and the environment
This article was published as part of our book marking the 40th anniversary of Eureka Network.