Nvidia's upcoming Rubin Ultra GPUs will push data center racks to a staggering 600 kilowatts by 2027 - nearly twice the power of today's fastest EV chargers. As AI infrastructure hits this thermal wall, Alloy Enterprises thinks the answer lies in revolutionary metal stacking technology that turns copper sheets into seamless cooling plates capable of handling extreme pressures and tight spaces.
The AI industry just hit a cooling reality check. When Nvidia announced its Rubin series GPUs in March, the company quietly dropped a bombshell: racks built with the Ultra version, expected in 2027, will consume up to 600 kilowatts of electricity. That's more power than most EV fast chargers can deliver.
The physics are unforgiving - all that electricity becomes heat, and traditional air cooling can't handle it. Enter Alloy Enterprises, a startup betting that stacks of precisely bonded metal sheets can solve AI's thermal crisis.
"We didn't care too much about that 20% when racks were 120 kilowatts," Ali Forsyth, co-founder and CEO of Alloy Enterprises, told TechCrunch. She's talking about the peripheral components - memory modules, networking chips, and support hardware that account for a fifth of a server's heat load. "But now, as racks have hit 480 kilowatts on their way to 600 kilowatts, engineers have to figure out how to liquid cool everything from RAM to networking chips, parts for which there are no solutions available today."
The startup's breakthrough centers on what it calls "stack forging" - a process that transforms sheets of copper into solid cooling plates without the traditional weaknesses of machined or 3D-printed alternatives. Unlike conventional cold plates that require machining two halves separately and fusing them together (creating potential leak points), Alloy's technique bonds metal sheets using precise heat and pressure to create seamless, solid copper blocks.
The technical advantages are significant. Stack forging can create cooling channels as narrow as 50 microns - about half the width of human hair - allowing more coolant to flow through the metal. According to Forsyth, this precision translates to 35% better thermal performance than competing solutions.
"We hit raw material properties," Forsyth explained to TechCrunch. "The copper is just as strong as if you had machined it," but without the structural compromises of traditional manufacturing.
