Cooling Operations Optimized for Leaps in Energy, Reliability and Carbon Hyperefficiency for Information Processing Systems (COOLERCHIPS) (SBIR/STTR) | DE FOA 0002852

Opportunity Information: Apply for DE FOA 0002852

The Cooling Operations Optimized for Leaps in Energy, Reliability and Carbon Hyperefficiency for Information Processing Systems (COOLERCHIPS) SBIR/STTR opportunity (FOA Number DE-FOA-0002852) is a competitive funding call from the U.S. Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) aimed at radically improving how high-performance computing hardware is cooled. The central idea is to push beyond incremental data center efficiency improvements and instead support high-risk, high-reward applied R&D that could reset the performance curve for electronics cooling. ARPA-E is looking for technologies that can plausibly become disruptive, meaning they could be manufactured and deployed at scale with a realistic path to cost and reliability that matches the practical expectations of modern compute infrastructure.

At a program level, COOLERCHIPS targets next-generation cooling systems for compute electronics that enable substantially higher power-density computing while using dramatically less energy for cooling. The headline performance goal is to cool power-dense computational systems, including data centers and modular EDGE deployments, while consuming 5 percent or less of the IT electrical load for cooling, in any U.S. location and at any time of year. In parallel, projects are expected to maintain or credibly approach the reliability and cost characteristics of conventional data centers, since a cooling breakthrough that is fragile, hard to maintain, or too expensive will not be adopted broadly. The program emphasizes that achieving efficiency alone is not enough; technologies must also address operational realities like uptime, failure modes, monitoring, serviceability, and overall lifecycle economics.

The FOA encourages proposals that leverage emerging advances across thermal management, coolant flow technologies, materials and surface engineering, manufacturing methods, system design, controls, and reliability engineering. Example topic areas include improved chip-to-cooler heat transfer using new materials, surface treatments, thermal interface solutions, and novel conduction approaches; advanced heat-transfer concepts that manipulate 3D fluid structures while minimizing thermal boundary layers; reliability-centered cooling system engineering that reduces failure severity and likelihood while improving detectability through health monitoring, controls, and system-level risk mitigation; and new modular data center or EDGE compute designs that can sustain high-density computing under widely varying ambient conditions with very high cooling efficiency. The intent is to pull together multidisciplinary teams that can connect component-level innovation to system-level performance, including expertise in servers and compute hardware, heat transfer, reliability modeling, controls, data center operations, techno-economics, and commercialization planning.

For this SBIR/STTR-specific call, ARPA-E limits applicants to two technical categories. Technical Category A focuses on innovations that remove heat from server chipsets and move it efficiently into facility cooling systems, in ways that could be integrated into existing data center compute rooms. This category is essentially about the pathway from the chip package through cold plates, heat spreaders, manifolds, working fluids, pumps, and heat exchangers, all the way to the facility interface, with the expectation that the solution supports very high rack power densities while keeping cooling energy extremely low. Technical Category B focuses on modular data center concepts (pods or stand-alone modules) designed to operate high-performance computing systems efficiently in any outside ambient environment across the United States. That means solutions must cope with extremes of temperature and humidity, seasonal variation, and siting constraints, while still meeting the aggressive cooling-power and power-density targets.

Although the broader COOLERCHIPS program defines four technical categories, Categories C and D are not available under this SBIR/STTR FOA and instead are offered under the companion "Standard" FOA (DE-FOA-0002851). Category C teams, funded under the Standard FOA, are expected to develop tools to design and analyze cooling and data center systems with an emphasis on optimizing reliability, energy use, CO2 footprint, and cost at the system level. Category D teams, also under the Standard FOA, are intended to provide testing facilities and evaluation support to help projects validate performance and bridge toward commercialization. ARPA-E explicitly encourages SBIR/STTR teams in Categories A and B to take advantage of support and collaboration with those Category C and D efforts where possible, since modeling and testing infrastructure can accelerate credible validation.

From a performance-target perspective, ARPA-E frames the technical ambition in concrete operational terms. Proposed solutions should aim for cooling power consumption at or below 5 percent of IT load while enabling extremely high rack power density, cited as 126 kW per 42U rack (or an equivalent density). The solution is expected to meet these targets for any U.S. location and any time of year, using design-day concepts analogous to ASHRAE methods (the FOA references a 0.4 percent design-day target). Beyond pure thermodynamics, teams must show a believable path to reliability and cost that is comparable to conventional data centers, meaning proposals should address not only peak cooling capability but also maintenance approach, redundancy philosophy, fault detection, failure containment, and operational continuity.

The program is structured for up to a 36-month period of performance and is staged to reduce risk early before committing to full-scale builds. ARPA-E anticipates that projects will begin with analytical and computational design work and then move into component-level and single-server testing to retire key technical risks. Around the midpoint, a Go/No-Go milestone is expected; teams must demonstrate sufficient progress and risk reduction to justify moving forward. In the second half, teams are expected to develop, fabricate, and test full-size prototypes, with rack-scale testing for Category A projects and full-scale modular data center or EDGE system demonstrations for Category B projects. This structure reflects ARPA-E's emphasis on applied R&D with measurable deliverables and decision points rather than open-ended research.

Administratively, this opportunity is open to eligible small businesses under the SBIR/STTR framework, and ARPA-E indicates it expects to make around 20 awards. The listed award ceiling is $3,952,638. The funding instruments are described as cooperative agreements and other ARPA-E financial assistance mechanisms, and awards are subject to the federal assistance rules in 2 CFR Part 200 (as supplemented by 2 CFR Part 910). Applications had to be submitted through ARPA-E eXCHANGE, which is ARPA-E's required submission portal; concept papers or materials submitted through other methods are not reviewed. The FOA provided support contacts for portal issues (ExchangeHelp@hq.doe.gov) and a program email (ARPA-E-CO@hq.doe.gov) for unanswered questions, along with ARPA-E's FAQ page.

In practical terms, COOLERCHIPS (SBIR/STTR) is designed for small businesses that can propose a credible, technically bold cooling approach and back it up with a plan that moves from modeling to prototypes, while also treating reliability and operational viability as first-class design constraints. The strongest-fit applicants are likely to be those with defensible technical differentiation (novel heat-transfer mechanisms, fluids, architectures, controls, materials, or manufacturing approaches) and a clear systems perspective showing how their solution would actually be deployed in real compute environments without trading away uptime, maintainability, or cost competitiveness.

• The Department of Energy, Advanced Research Projects Agency Energy in the opportunity zone benefits, science and technology and other research and development sector is offering a public funding opportunity titled "Cooling Operations Optimized for Leaps in Energy, Reliability and Carbon Hyperefficiency for Information Processing Systems (COOLERCHIPS) (SBIR/STTR)" and is now available to receive applicants.
• Interested and eligible applicants and submit their applications by referencing the CFDA number(s): 81.135.
• This funding opportunity was created on Sep 22, 2022.
• Applicants must submit their applications by Oct 26, 2022 Submissions to this FOA are due no later than 930 a.m. Eastern Time on 10/26/2022. Applicants are strongly encouraged to submit at least 48 hours in advance of the due date.. (Agency may still review applications by suitable applicants for the remaining/unused allocated funding in 2026.)
• Each selected applicant is eligible to receive up to $3,952,638.00 in funding.
• The number of recipients for this funding is limited to 20 candidate(s).
• Eligible applicants include: Small businesses.

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