Climate-tech nonprofit Elemental Impact has opened its Data Center Innovation Initiative, committing up to $5 million (roughly 4.3 million euros) per project to cooling and infrastructure startups, according to Natural Refrigerants' coverage. The program will back up to 10 companies at $500,000 to $5 million each, running selected projects through 2027. Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft are co-sponsors, identifying priority technology areas and supplying deployment sites.
The initiative does not fund vague efficiency claims. To qualify, a cooling technology must demonstrate either a 30 to 80 percent reduction in water usage effectiveness (WUE) or a 20 to 40 percent reduction in cooling-related power usage effectiveness (PUE). It must operate across a 0 to 40C ambient range without degradation, retrofit into existing facilities with less than 10 percent downtime impact, and stay compatible with installed infrastructure. Those are the metrics operators already track, which is the point: a startup that cannot move WUE or PUE on a live floor does not advance.
The water-or-energy framing maps directly onto the water-power tradeoff operators keep getting wrong. Evaporative cooling cuts power draw but spends millions of gallons; dry and closed-loop designs save water and pay for it in compressor energy. By letting applicants clear the bar on either axis, Elemental Impact is funding both sides of that tradeoff rather than betting on one cooling architecture.
The publication highlights two natural-refrigerant vendors as the kind of company the program targets. Zudek builds ammonia (R717) chillers and installed one at a German data center in 2024. M&M Carnot builds CO2-based cooling units and has claimed free-cooling energy reductions up to 70 percent in data center duty. Both fit the WUE and PUE thresholds, and both have lacked hyperscaler-scale deployment sites to prove it. The initiative supplies exactly that: testing at existing data centers operated by the four sponsors.
Eligibility is narrow. Applicants must be for-profit standalone companies with at least 20 full-time employees and demonstrated traction through completed pilots or commercial deployment. CEO Dawn Lippert framed the sponsor role as deployment acceleration, helping entrepreneurs commercialize technologies that reduce emissions. Projects are expected to run 12 to 18 months, with priority applications due July 15, 2026.
This is patient capital aimed at the unglamorous middle of the cooling stack: chillers, refrigerants and heat-rejection retrofits, not chip-level cold plates. That niche has struggled to attract growth funding even as the broader thermal market expands, a dynamic visible in the $14 billion immersion-cooling forecast for 2034. By underwriting retrofit-ready water and energy reductions on hyperscaler floors, Elemental Impact is effectively de-risking the equipment decisions that determine whether a facility cools with water it does not have or power the grid cannot spare.