The incremental performance required to meet the AI opportunity is demanding more and more power. The industry is moving from 20kW racks to 100kW racks and even on pace for 1 MW racks in the near-term. Current solutions error towards over-provisioning of cooling as the only way to cool AI data centers and avoid throttling, margin compression, thermal instability and other compromises.
Matt Langman discusses Phononic’s approach to targeting hot spots to cool with precision, enabling precise cooling and intelligent workload placement and orchestration, and avoiding the drawbacks of over-provisioned cooling. Hear about the Phononic vision for Thermal Fabric, intelligently connecting hotspots across the data center to unlock even greater levels of performance, TCO and returns on investment.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
[Ana Berry]
I’m Anna Berry here at OFC 2026 in Los Angeles. I’m speaking with Matt and Brooks at Phononic. Matt, unleash every watt, unlock every degree. So what does that mean today? And over the next five years?
[Matt Langman]
So today’s AI data centers are driving more and more performance. To do that, that takes more and more power. We’re going from 20 kilowatt racks to hundreds of kilowatts to eventually one megawatt racks. So lots of power. And right now the industry is just over provisioning. So you get thermal instability, you get margin compression, all sorts of issues that we have to work through as an industry to deliver on that performance. So at Phononic, what we’re doing is we’re targeting those hot spots to effectively cool with precision and in millisecond response times. We then add intelligence and using predictive analytics to effectively cool, allowing data center operators to not waste energy and not to waste cost. Therefore unleashing every watt, unlocking every degree to get like a 3X ROI on their investment and maximize performance. And they’re overall investments in their data center. So they’re not wasting energy and wasting time.
[Ana Berry]
And what about in five years? What are you most excited about with all of this?
[Matt Langman]
Yeah, so the excitement for us is as there are more and more heat challenges in the data center and as we provide solutions that are intelligent in solving those, we can then connect all of those different hot spots into what we call a thermal fabric. So now you can do workload placement and workload orchestration as a function of thermal and power, which will unlock new levels of ROI, new levels of TCO. And that allows data center operators to continue to be more efficient in their investments, get even more performance and even more services revenues and more capabilities.
[Ana Berry]
All right well thank you Matt, thank you Brooks for this conversation and thank you all for watching, we’re here at OFC 2026.
