Vancouver-based Wafr Technologies says it has raised $100 million toward a $300 million fundraising target as it looks to commercialize cooling technology for AI data centres.
The company announced this week that the financing will support the development of a Canadian artificial intelligence research lab, expand research and development, and accelerate commercialization of its cooling platform for high-density computing environments.
Wafr is targeting one of the most important constraints facing AI infrastructure: cooling.
As AI workloads drive higher rack densities and increased demand for computing capacity, data centre operators are under growing pressure to manage power consumption, water use, and heat rejection. Wafr says its proprietary system is designed to reduce the environmental impact of AI data centres without compromising compute performance.
According to the company, typical data centres can use up to 10 million litres of water per megawatt annually, while cooling can account for 30 to 45 per cent of a facility’s total electricity load. Wafr says its technology can cut water consumption by up to 95 per cent and cooling power use by up to 80 per cent.
The company’s platform is positioned around closed-loop cooling infrastructure for AI workloads. Wafr describes its approach as focused on the facility and chiller side of data centre operations rather than chip-level cooling, making it complementary to direct-to-chip liquid cooling, rack-level cooling, and other high-density compute systems.
Wafr’s product stack includes FRDGE, a thermal dispatch platform that connects into a data centre’s secondary cooling loop; Thermint, a software layer designed to orchestrate cooling based on load, price, ambient conditions, and water stress; and TerraQuant, a measurement and verification layer intended to track energy, water, and carbon performance.
“Artificial intelligence represents one of the greatest advancements of our generation but we don’t want it to come at an environmental cost to future generations,” said Bikram Singh, co-founder and CEO of Wafr Technologies. “Our vision is to build a globally recognized AI research lab in Canada and be a leader in how we can reduce the impact to water and energy.”
Wafr says the planned research lab will bring together researchers, engineers, and industry partners to develop next-generation AI infrastructure technologies in Canada. The company says its work has already been demonstrated in India and Dubai.
“Our technology demonstrates that economic growth and environmental stewardship are not competing priorities,” said Wafr co-founder Darrell Kopke. “Canada has an opportunity to lead the world in sustainable AI, and we’re building the technology to make that possible.”
The announcement comes as the data centre industry faces a new wave of demand from AI training and inference workloads. That growth is forcing operators, developers, and governments to rethink how facilities are powered, cooled, permitted, and measured.
For Wafr, the opportunity is to make cooling less of a bottleneck in the buildout of AI infrastructure.
The company says the $100 million raised to date will help move its cooling technology toward broader commercialization while supporting its larger $300 million campaign to build sustainable AI infrastructure from Canada.