Baratunde Cola is the CEO and founder of Carbice, an Atlanta, Georgia-based company that develops scalable interface solutions to protect semiconductors and electrical components from overheating in any physical environment. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Vanderbilt University and his doctorate from Purdue University, all in mechanical engineering. He also served as the starting fullback on his college football team while earning his degrees. Cola has invented more than 30 patents and published numerous highly cited papers related to energy transfer and nanotechnology in publications including Nature Nanotechnology and the Journal of Applied Physics. In 2017, he was named the top scientist or engineer in the United States under 35 years old by the National Science Foundation. He is an award-winning public speaker and frequent keynote presenter.
Tell us about your company.
Carbice is an energy solutions company built on foundational materials technology developed in 2011 at Georgia Tech. We make thermal interface materials (TIMs) based on metal foil and carbon nanotubes that solve one of the most persistent and underappreciated problems in electronics: efficiently removing heat. Our flagship product, Carbice Pad, is a vertically aligned carbon nanotube array bonded to aluminum foil that conforms to surfaces, transfers heat exceptionally well, and holds up under the mechanical stresses that traditional TIMs can’t handle. In addition to the Carbice Pad, we have developed products for specific industries, including the Space Pad for space applications and the Ice Pad for PC enthusiasts. We also have solutions in development that help eliminate torque loss in bolts and enable “tape-on” spot cooling on PCB boards and bus bars. As a whole, our solutions support data centers, aerospace, defense, and high-powered computing.
What problems are you solving?
At the most fundamental level, we’re solving a mechanical contact problem – compression set and shear flow – that has never been solved. Heat can only move as fast as the interface allows, and most interfaces in electronics today are bottlenecks filled with voids, gaps, and inconsistencies that develop over time. Traditional TIMs like thermal grease or phase-change materials pump out over time, dry out, or just don’t make reliable contact at the pressures and temperatures modern chips operate at. Emerging solutions like liquid metal and graphite pads have similar mechanical failure modes.
There’s also a mechanical problem that doesn’t get enough attention: high-power GPUs physically bow and flex under load. We call it the trampolining effect. That flexing breaks contact between the chip and the TIM, which drives up temperatures at the exact moment you need them at their lowest. Our Carbice pads are engineered to maintain contact through that flexing. That’s not something that greases or pads built for previous generations of thermal loads can reliably do.
What application areas are your strongest?
AI infrastructure and space are where we’re seeing the most momentum right now.
On the data center side, the thermal demands from modern AI accelerators have fundamentally changed the math. Rack densities are climbing, chip TPDs are pushing into the hundreds of watts, and the industry is scrambling to keep up. We’re engaged with customers building next-generation AI data center campuses, including a partnership with DarkNX, where our solutions are part of the thermal architecture from the ground up.
In space, we became the first thermal interface solution deployed on the International Space Station as part of NASA’s HALO program. Space is the most unforgiving qualification environment there is, with extreme temperature swings, vacuum, radiation, and zero margin for failure. Our Space Pad was designed to meet that bar, and it has.
We’re also embedded in aerospace platforms through partnerships with companies like Blue Canyon Technologies and SWISSto12.
What keeps your customers up at night?
Delivering thermal budget at market speed and scale. Every customer we talk to, whether they’re designing a satellite payload or a liquid-cooled AI server rack, is running out of thermal headroom. Chips are getting more powerful faster than cooling infrastructure can adapt. And the cost of getting it wrong is high: throttled performance, shortened component life, or outright failure.
In the data center world specifically, customers are also anxious about efficiency. Power usage effectiveness (PUE) is under pressure from both an economic and a sustainability standpoint. Better thermal interfaces help the whole system run more efficiently, and that has direct operational cost implications at scale.
In aerospace and defense, the concern is reliability under extreme conditions. You can’t send a technician to fix a satellite. You can’t swap out a thermal pad in a deployed military system. Our customers need materials that perform consistently over the years in environments that would destroy conventional solutions.
What does the competitive landscape look like and how do you differentiate?
The TIM market has traditional players making greases, pads, and phase-change materials that have been around for decades. They’re good products, optimized for the thermal loads of a previous era. The challenge is that those loads have changed dramatically, and incremental improvements to conventional materials have real limits.
Carbon nanotubes combined with metal foil in our technology give us a fundamentally different starting point. The ease of use, the thermal conductivity potential, the mechanical compliance, the long-term stability: these aren’t marginal improvements, they’re a different class of solution. We’re not competing on price per gram. We’re competing on system-level performance and reliability, and for customers whose applications genuinely push the limits, that’s where the decision gets made.
Our other differentiator is depth of knowledge. This technology emerged from rigorous academic research, and the science behind what we do is something we understand at a level that’s hard to replicate quickly.
Customers often tell us that we also have the best lead times in the industry because of our very efficient 23,000 sq ft of domestic manufacturing in Atlanta, GA combined with unmatched product robustness in storage.
What new features/technology are you working on?
We’re expanding our product line to address a wider range of form factors and application requirements through Carbice Lab, our avenue for custom and application-specific development. As chip architectures evolve, with more chiplets, more heterogeneous integration, and tighter packaging, the thermal interface requirements get more complex. We’re building the tools and processes to meet customers where they are.
We can do some very unique things with our product because of the robust metal foil core. Everyone wants a metal TIM, and we have the best technology in that class, combining foil with carbon nanotubes to control dynamic contact because it will never pump out or delaminate. We are working on a few things closer to the silicon that we feel will disrupt the performance and cost curve of packaging AI chips tremendously.
How do customers normally engage with your company?
Most engagements start with a customer thermal-system requirement. A customer is designing a new system, hitting a wall on thermal performance, or qualifying materials for a demanding application. They come to us, we understand the requirements, and we figure out together whether an existing product is the right fit or whether something custom makes more sense.
For customers who want to evaluate our materials before committing, we offer sample programs and application support through Carbice Lab.
Customers often send us their systems, and we do testing for them in our labs before they commit their team resources. We work closely with engineering teams through the qualification process to ensure their success.
We’re a relatively small team, which means customers get direct access to people who actually understand the technology.
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