Sheffield’s $107m-funded (£80m) Iceotope has been revealed as the current second-placed runner in a two-horse race to lead the UK’s globally second-placed AI cooling industry.
Tracxn, a global market intelligence platform for private company data, released The Race to Cool Britain’s AI Boom: How UK cooling and heat-reuse technology is answering AI’s water and energy demands, a new report on the United Kingdom’s cooling and heat-reuse technology sector for AI data centres, examining the companies that supply the equipment operators use to manage the heat these facilities generate.
The research finds UK companies have raised about $362 million in disclosed equity funding, placing the country second globally behind the United States and ahead of Singapore. That standing rests almost entirely on two companies, London’s Deep Green and Iceotope, even as rising AI power density and tightening UK water-planning rules build a stronger case for the water-efficient cooling and heat-reuse technology this cohort builds.
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Deep Green, a London-based operator of immersion-cooled edge data centres founded in 2021, raised $255 million in a Series D from Octopus Energy Generation through the Octopus Energy Transition Fund. Iceotope, meanwhile, a Sheffield-based maker of precision dielectric liquid-cooling systems founded in 2005, has raised $107 million across rounds dating to 2013, including a $26 million round in May 2026 backed by nVent, British Patient Capital, Barclays, and Northern Gritstone.
That concentration gives the UK its global second place: three markets account for about 91% of worldwide funding, with the United States at roughly 63%, the UK at about 18%, and Singapore whose total sits within a single company, EPG at about 10%.
AI is driving both the power and the heat data centres must manage. The IEA estimates global data-centre electricity use will roughly double from about 485 TWh in 2025 to around 950 TWh by 2030, and rack power density has risen from roughly 20 kW to more than 135 kW as chips like NVIDIA’s Blackwell GB200 NVL72 move to liquid cooling by design. Much of that load lands on water: a single 1 MW facility can use up to 25.5 million litres a year for cooling, and Google reported about 8.1 billion gallons of water use across its facilities and offices in 2024, up from 6.4 billion the year before.
In the UK, data centres gained Critical National Infrastructure status in 2024, and government-backed AI Growth Zones are set to expand the buildout further. The Environment Agency projects a public water-supply shortfall of nearly 5 billion litres a day across England by 2055, and about 84% of proposed water-intensive data-centre developments sit in areas that are already water-stressed, or are projected to be by 2040.
Although the funding landscape is dominated by London and Sheffield’s “big two,” a further 10 UK companies made it into Tracxn’s report. The UK’s 12 total tracked companies map onto the path heat takes through a facility, from the chip where it is generated to the networks where it can be reused.
Facility-level cooling, covering air handling, evaporative and adiabatic systems, and chillers, is the largest layer with five companies, including Weatherite, EcoCooling, Excool, Airedale, and Eaton-Williams. Rack-level systems, including Iceotope, Comino Grando, and CoolTera, serve the layer where the UK’s largest liquid-cooling company sits. Heat reuse, the layer Deep Green anchors alongside Omniko and ThermAI, captures rejected heat and redirects it to external users such as district heat networks.
Chip-level cooling, the direct-to-chip and two-phase approach that rising AI rack density most favours, has just one UK company, Infiniflux. That leaves the segment one of the more likely points for new capital to enter as density keeps climbing, the report suggests.
Globally, cooling and heat-reuse funding has stepped up since 2022: the sector has raised over $2 billion across 117 rounds from 157 tracked companies worldwide, and 2026 year-to-date funding of $585 million across 11 rounds already exceeds the $306 million raised in all of 2024. Recent rounds have also grown larger and later-stage, led globally by Frore Systems and EPG, a sign that capital is concentrating in the category’s most-funded companies rather than spreading evenly across the field.
In the UK, the report surmises that near-term opportunity sits with the ten early-stage companies outside Deep Green and Iceotope as they build the commercial track record needed to attract disclosed funding of their own. With an established liquid-cooling company in Iceotope, a scaled heat-reuse company in Deep Green, and a UK regulatory backdrop that is tightening around both water and heat, Tracxn’s research points to a market with a supportive demand signal and clear room for capital to broaden beyond its current two anchors.
Simon Jesenko, CEO and CFO of Iceotope, said in May: “We’ve spent years developing a robust, differentiated IP portfolio and products purpose-built for AI infrastructure, and we’re ready to scale at precisely the moment the industry demands more advanced, sustainable cooling technology. The opportunity ahead – both directly with customers and through our partner ecosystem – is significant.”
Image courtesy Iceotope.com
