Tony Atti, Ph.D. is Phononic’s CEO. Tony is an experienced technology entrepreneur and executive, who is passionate about disruptive technology solutions that change our lives. As CEO and Co-Founder of Phononic, Dr. Atti has led the company’s mission to sustainably transform global cooling and heating through semiconductor innovation. The Company’s thermoelectric technology platform provides mission critical cooling for chip-level hotspots across the data center, including Optics (Pluggable & Co-packaged); GPU/HBM; switches and server rack/infrastructure. The company’s enterprise cooling solutions provide end-users flexible access to hardware and software systems that drive AI computing, dramatically mitigate CO2 emissions, and lower data center energy consumption.
Tell us about your company?
Phononic is the preeminent leader in solid state cooling solutions for data centers, deployed across every major hyperscaler today with a suite of integrated thermoelectric solutions for networking, GPU HBMs, and AI rack/infrastructure. Phononic’s portfolio of cooling solutions delivers precision cooling when and where it is needed, optimizing AI infrastructure, minimizing costly overprovisioning, delivering cooling in millisecond timing, unlocking performance, and dramatically improving ROI, useful lifetime, and energy efficiency.
What problems are you solving?
AI is transforming the data center — and cooling is consuming almost as much power as computing with increasingly limited effectiveness. Compute density and thermal loads are surging, creating performance bottlenecks and wasting energy by overprovisioning. Conventional cooling approaches lack the precision and real-time responsiveness to manage rapid thermal fluctuations, resulting in throttled workloads and higher operational overhead.
By addressing the fundamental thermal management challenges of data centers, we’re addressing the performance-hindering bottlenecks currently impacting AI infrastructure. Deployed via our Thermal Kit, Phononic’s solution encompasses thermoelectric coolers, scalable cartridges, integrated software, thermal modeling & design support. Phononic’s solution delivers precise, predictive thermal control for compute-intensive AI workloads, anywhere in the data center. Our thermoelectric coolers (TECs) deliver rapid cooling and precise temperature control when and where it’s needed. This is critical for high-speed optical transceivers and co-packaged optics as data centers transition to 1.6T compute.
Further, we solve the problem of managing multiple systems within a data center as our solutions are able to be seamlessly integrated into existing system-level hardware, computing nodes, chassis and racks. Our approach offers operators dynamic flexibility to actively optimize PUE, compute, and lifespan variables as desired, in real-time, across the entire data center.
The problems we solve are best seen in the results we create. For example, Phononic’s cooling solution for GPU HBMs delivers up to 0.15 PUE savings, 5X lifetime improvement, 40% greater compute performance, and a 3X ROI. It is designed to maintain tightly regulated operating conditions under highly dynamic heat loads. With an increase in 75% cooling capability, the system enables higher sustained GPU performance, reduces thermally-induced throttling, and improves overall cluster stability.
What application areas are your strongest?
We have an entire suite of integrated thermoelectric solutions for networking, including new solutions for 1.6T pluggables, CPOs and GPU HBMs. I would say it’s not a single application area that is our strongest, but our ability to create bespoke solutions for the varying needs of today’s data centers, all integrated through our Thermal Fabric for total data center and workload orchestration. Not all facilities have the same challenges, but we create each solution to specifically target the unique requirements of each of our customers.
What keeps your customers up at night?
From our conversations with customers there’s a tug of war between increasing compute performance, facilities management, and component lifetime — not to mention an insatiable demand for capacity. Our customers are looking for partners that can unleash their AI compute performance, but in a manner that is scalable for their long-term growth and ROI. With deployments across every major hyperscaler, the industry’s first qualified and deployed 1.6T HVM solution, and a scalable contract manufacturing network, our customers know Phononic is an organization they can depend on.
What does the competitive landscape look like and how do you differentiate?
The majority of cooling solutions currently in the market are over-provisioned, unintelligent, and imprecise — focusing on the broad heat management challenge instead capitalizing on the exponential performance potential of node-level thermal management.
Phononic differentiates by taking a proactive, precise approach to attacking the hotspots themselves throughout the entire data center. A cooling process that usually takes minutes to address, can be addressed in milliseconds thanks to our two-way, spot cooling approach. We also analyze signals upstream allowing us to anticipate when a thermal load is coming so we can pre-cool and ensure the server and system remains stable — addressing the spot before it even has a chance to heat up. And our embedded SW/FW enable data center architects and operators to constantly learn, optimize and refine the performance of their infrastructure, unlocking uptime, enabling strategic workload placement and orchestration, and protecting against productivity losses or un-planned downtimes.
What new features/technology are you working on?
We actually just announced an expanded optical networking portfolio, including 1.6T pluggable and CPO cooling solutions. In addition, we are excited to be sampling our thermal-kit enabled GPU HBM cooling solution for AI data centers.
Our expanded portfolio of cooling for optical transceivers, including 1.6T Pluggables, support greater than 50% higher heat load while maintaining power consumption. Our CPO-ready Thermal Kit delivers advanced packaging and localized cooling for co-packaged optical engines in scale out and scale up applications, and is perfectly suited for the inevitable market transition to co-packaged optics more broadly, unlocking additional performance headroom, reducing signal path distance and associated energy draw, and enabling the scale and bandwidth density required for next generation fabrics. Finally, our Next Gen HBM4 Aligned GPU HBM Cooling Solution is incredible, delivering up to 0.15 PUE savings, 5X lifetime improvement, 40% greater compute performance, and a 3X ROI for data centers.
How do customers normally engage with your company?
Our customers can be across the spectrum of data center operators — from the owner of the facility to specific component design suppliers looking for the right cooling solution mix. From the start of the engagement, whether it is a new build or a retrofit or specific component level cooling solution, we work with the customer to design the specific platform for them to be successful. Every engagement and deployment from us is designed in partnership and collaboration with the customer.
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