Liquid-to-Chip Cooling at the 1MW Frontier: Jabil and Mikros Technologies Roadmap

Author: Drew Mer, CEO, Mikros Technologies (a Jabil company) Collection: 2025 OCP Global Summit - Expo Hall Sessions

Summary

Mikros Technologies (acquired by Jabil approximately one year prior) presents its approach to advanced cold plate design for 1 MW rack cooling, emphasizing that the critical metric is not total thermal design power (TDP) but heat flux density (watts per degree C per square centimeter). Founded around 1991 from a NASA space station two-phase and single-phase cooling project, Mikros has 35 years of experience in high-heat-flux applications. Their cold plate designs use a proprietary "micro-channel matrix" instead of traditional fin structures, achieving significantly lower thermal resistance.

Lab data comparing Mikros' lowest-performing matrix plate against top traditional fin designs shows the matrix consistently delivers higher watts per degree C per square centimeter across flow rates, with the advantage growing at higher power densities. The matrix design also enables power-map-customized cooling: individual "pixels" can be tuned up or down to match chip hot spots, with cooling reduced over lower-power areas like HBMs while maintaining junction temperature compliance. This reduces total flow rates required, which compounds across servers, racks, and rows into significant facility-level energy savings. The presentation provides a thermal resistance model for lidless die configurations: TIM (thermal interface material) resistance plus cold plate resistance, where cold plate resistance decomposes into sensible flow resistance and conductive resistance -- the latter being the target for optimization.

By offering lower thermal resistance, Mikros enables five benefits: higher compute powers (more TDP headroom), warmer coolant inlet temperatures (10-20 degrees C hotter, reducing chiller requirements), lower junction temperatures (extending chip life), lower flow rates (reducing pump power), and tighter packaging densities. Both single-phase and two-phase solutions are supported for 1 MW rack cooling.