The growth of AI is hampered by computational power. Increasing demands for AI to become ever more powerful and ever more accessible have placed a requirement for there to be ever more powerful computer chips. However, increasingly powerful chips produce more heat, making cooling a key bottleneck.
The early versions of OpenAI’s ChatGPT were trained on NVIDIA chips, which used 400W of power. However, only 4 years later, new GPUs and AI accelerators are already looking to increase the power requirements by 10x, which requires liquid cooling. NVIDIA’s recent adoption of liquid cooling for its latest generations of data centre GPUs has highlighted this key demand.
Coming out of stealth mode, semiconductor cooling startup Corintis has today announced that it has raised a $24M Series A to address this problem. The round was led by BlueYard Capital with participation from Founderful, Acequia Capital, Celsius Industries, XTX Ventures, among others. Corintis also announces that it will be opening multiple US offices to better serve its American customers in addition to an Engineering office in Munich, Germany.
To date, the company has raised $33.4M in total. Instead of facing AI off against computational requirements, their technology embraces AI to help cool computer chips more effectively. As part of this funding, Chairman of Walden International and Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan has joined as a board director and investor prior to becoming Intel CEO, in addition to Geoff Lyon (former CEO & Founder of CoolIT), also joining the board. With this addition to the board, Corintis doubles down on building a bridge between the worlds of semiconductor design, manufacturing, and chip-cooling.
Corintis’s technology focuses on microfluidic cooling: Optimised micro-scale liquid cooling for computer chips in data centres, which are used for advanced computation, including for generative AI. In addition to having several major American tech giants as customers, the company already enjoys a partnership with Microsoft to help bring this cutting-edge technology to the real world. Earlier this week, Microsoft announced that in collaboration with Corintis, it has successfully achieved a breakthrough by developing an in-chip microfluidic cooling system that can effectively cool a server running core services. Tests showed that microfluidic cooling embedded inside the chip removed heat a staggering three times better than the most advanced technology commonly used today.
Based on research conducted at the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, Corintis was co-founded by Dr Remco van Erp (CEO), Sam Harrison (COO) & Prof Elison Matioli (Scientific Adviser).
Corintis’ solution relies on two main elements to achieve its mission of 10x better cooling: Firstly, “co-designed microfluidic cooling”. Corintis develops best-in-class simulation and optimization software and new manufacturing methods to design micro-scale optimized liquid cooling, or Microfluidic cooling, that is adapted to the chip to bring the right liquid to the right location. This can be supplied as either a drop-in replacement to any liquid cooling system today, or integrated together with the chip, as “co-packaged cooling”, to reach up to an order of magnitude increase in cooling performance. Their technology also enables data centers to reduce their water consumption, a key ecological concern of AI technologies.
Corintis’ platform builds a bridge between chip and cooling design, enabling chip designers to build the next generation of AI chips with superior thermal performance. The technology platforms the company has already developed include Glacierware, to help automate the design of cooling systems, a copper microfluidic manufacturing facility to manufacture cold plates with features as small as a human hair in high volume, and its Therminator platform, allowing chip companies to physically emulate next-gen chips with millimetre accuracy on silicon test chips before production to validate their cooling solution ahead of time.
The company has already manufactured over ten thousand cooling systems, with deployments running in data centers on leading-edge AI chips. It has already achieved 8-digit cumulative revenue since its incorporation. It is on track to more than 10x this with its early deployments. With new funding, the company looks to scale its already sizable team of 55 employees today to over 70 by the end of the year, and ramp up its manufacturing footprint even further, aiming to achieve a capacity exceeding a million microfluidic cold plates annually during 2026. With this scale, Corintis is ready to play a decisive role in the advancement of computational and AI power.
Stealthy BRICKSTORM Backdoor Enables Espionage into Tech and Legal Sector
Posted in Commentary with tags Google on September 25, 2025 by itnerdResearchers have tracked a stealthy “next-level” Chinese hacking campaign dubbed “BRICKSTONE” that targets and maintains persistent access to legal services and technology companies by stealing intellectual property, mining intelligence on national security and trade while developing other cyberattacks for the future.
More details are available here: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/brickstorm-espionage-campaign
Ensar Seker, CISO at SOCRadar, commented:
“This Brickstorm campaign marks a striking evolution in adversary tradecraft. What makes it “next level” is not simply the long dwell times or precision targeting, though both are alarming, but rather the strategic layering of access, reconnaissance, and supply-chain influence. By infiltrating tech security and legal services firms, the attackers don’t just get to access those environments, they gain pathways into their clients and partners, giving them a multiplier effect on reach. Some of those downstream systems may not even realize they’ve been compromised yet.
“The motivation here is long-term, not opportunistic. Brickstorm’s operators are methodically exfiltrating intellectual property and internal designs, which gives them a unique insight into how to bypass defenses and identify zero-day opportunities. In effect, they’re embedding themselves into the ecosystem, harvesting the same tools and knowledge base they hope to exploit later. That kind of foresight suggests a campaign designed not just for espionage, but for building capabilities that can support multiple future attacks.
“From a defensive posture, this raises the bar. Security firms, the very guardians of trust, must now treat themselves as high-priority targets in their own right. That means rethinking how we design isolation, telemetry, and insider-monitoring within security operations. It means segmenting access zones not just for customers, but even among internal service components. It demands relentless threat hunting, especially in trust relationships and client integrations. In practical terms, organizations should assume that any vendor they trust may be compromised, not eventually, but right now. That means requiring stricter attestation, enforcing zero-trust architectures around vendor connections, validating every cross-tenant data flow, and adopting reciprocal visibility with those vendors. The fact that Brickstorm is already leveraging downstream infiltration highlights just how fragile the boundary between ‘client’ and ‘supplier’ has become.
“In a nutshell, Brickstorm is a wake-up call: adversaries are no longer treating high-value firms as endpoints to exploit, but as nodes in a broader intelligence and access network. Defending against that requires that we think in ecosystems and assume compromise, not just for ourselves, but for every connected party.”
I am actually quite disturbed by this as this sounds like the cold war all over again. This highlights the fact that the bad guys come in all shapes and sizes as well as agendas.
UPDATE: Cybercrime expert and VP of Cyber Risk for HITRUST, Tom Kellermann had this to say
“Since the Titan Rain campaign, China has pursued an insurgency strategy in American cyberspace, maintaining persistent access through sophisticated backdoors, like BRICKSTORM that serve as the cornerstone of their economic espionage operations. These initial compromises enable secondary infections and lateral movement across networks, creating a cascading security threat that must be systematically eradicated to protect both national and economic security.”
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