Barcelona SME building immersion cooling hardware that cuts data centre energy use, with growing expertise in AI accelerator thermal infrastructure.
Submer Technologies is a Barcelona-based SME that designs and manufactures immersion cooling systems for data centres — hardware solutions where servers are submerged in thermally conductive, non-electrically-conductive liquid to dramatically reduce energy consumption compared to traditional air cooling. Their core product addresses the thermal management crisis in high-density computing environments, making data centres significantly more energy-efficient and physically compact. Beyond the hardware product itself, they bring deep expertise in the economics and engineering tradeoffs of green data centre infrastructure. Their move into the European PILOT project signals an expansion toward supporting next-generation compute hardware, including AI accelerators, where their cooling technology is particularly relevant.
Founded their EU research portfolio on the 'Submer' project (2018-2020), developing efficient eco-friendly immersion cooling specifically for data centres, and this expertise carries into their PILOT participation.
Energy efficiency appears as a keyword across both H2020 projects, reflecting a consistent commercial focus on reducing PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) in compute-intensive environments.
Their participation in The European PILOT (2021-2026) connects their cooling hardware to machine learning accelerator workloads, positioning them at the intersection of AI infrastructure and thermal management.
The European PILOT project — focused on independent, local, open technologies — brought Submer into a broader hardware scalability and ecosystem conversation beyond their own product.
Submer began their H2020 journey in 2018 with a tightly focused, product-development mandate: prove that server immersion cooling could work at scale in real data centres, with funding dedicated to making their own technology commercially viable. By 2021, their focus had broadened — they joined a large RIA consortium centred on open hardware, scalability, and machine learning acceleration, suggesting they had moved past the "does it work?" phase and into the "where does it fit in the broader compute ecosystem?" phase. The clearest signal is the appearance of "machine learning" and "accelerator" in their recent keywords: the explosion of GPU/AI workloads is precisely the market that most urgently needs advanced cooling, and Submer appears to be deliberately positioning themselves there.
Submer is moving from a single-product cooling company toward becoming a thermal infrastructure partner for next-generation AI and high-performance compute hardware — a market undergoing rapid growth driven by LLM and GPU cluster deployments.
Submer is comfortable leading — they coordinated their largest and most defining project themselves, which is unusual for an SME and reflects confidence in their technology direction. In their second project they stepped back into a participant role within a much larger consortium, suggesting they know when to lead and when to contribute a specialist capability. With 22 unique partners across 9 countries from only 2 projects, they engage in genuinely broad networks rather than repeatedly working with the same organisations.
Despite only two H2020 projects, Submer has connected with 22 distinct consortium partners across 9 countries, reflecting active engagement in international research networks rather than isolated bilateral work. Their geographic spread suggests European-level visibility well beyond their Barcelona base.
Submer occupies a rare position as a deep-tech hardware SME that both builds a physical commercial product (immersion cooling tanks) and participates meaningfully in EU research — most cooling vendors are either pure commercial players or academic spinouts, not both. Their technology directly addresses the fastest-growing pain point in the EU data centre sector: the energy and space cost of cooling AI workloads, which is why hyperscalers and edge compute operators are their natural customers. For a consortium looking to add credible, commercially-grounded data centre thermal management expertise, Submer brings both real product experience and a track record of EU-funded validation.
