The French company Qarnot has closed a €35M financing round with Société Générale Ventures, the Demeter Climate Infrastructure Fund, ADEME investments, Colam Impact and La Banque des Territoires (on behalf of the French state). The investment is intended to accelerate Qarnot's efforts to handle waste heat from IT infrastructure, and lower energy consumption in the process.

Qarnot's technology has been put to use for the past 12 years to reuse heat from intensive computing facilities. It has deployed 100 units of its digital boiler and installed 70,000 HPC cores for cloud-computing facilities. Qarnot now “aims to several next-generation data centers in France and in Europe, with power ranging from hundreds of kW to a few MW, the company says.

Its Qbx is a computing unit similar to a computing rack, allowing water to be heated to as high as 60 degrees C (140F) and make use of 95% of the waste heat emitted by servers.

“The new paradigm (for the industry) is based on circularity,” said Qarnot co-founder and CEO Paul Benoit. “Our new large scale business model is convincing: we are shaping the next generation of data centers, rethinking how energy can be better consumed.”

Lead investor Société Générale's Alexandre Fleury, Co-Head of Global Market Activities, said, “Our CSR policy leads us to transform our activities and our services to assist our clients and our economies in their transition. The partnership we signed with Qarnot, pioneer and leader in the reuse of data centers’ waste heat, is part of the concrete initiatives that give shape to our ambition.”

Photo courtesy of Qarnot.