Fireside Chat, Interview, Conference Presentation
Energy and AI: Sustainable, Sovereign Industrial Campuses | Alain Wilmouth, 2CRSi | RAISE 2026
- 2CRSI pioneered liquid immersion cooling for servers starting in 2013, launching dedicated DLC (Direct Liquid Cooling) servers in 2015.
- Early adoption was driven by US universities and national labs seeking to reduce cooling energy costs, where historical energy ratios often reached 1:1 (1,000W for cooling per 1,000W for compute).
- Modern regulations in the Netherlands and Germany now mandate Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) targets of 1.2 and 1.3 respectively, necessitating advanced cooling portfolios.
- The company is building a consortium named ITER to support a new AI gigafactory in France, currently providing 42 megawatts of computing capacity across two sites near Strasbourg.
- ITER partners include established industrial firms such as Dassault Systèmes, VeriVend, Equans, and Hafner Energy, rather than startups.
- The consortium aims to achieve a negative carbon footprint by utilizing biomass gasification with Hafner Energy, storing carbon long-term rather than relying on carbon credits.
- Microsoft currently purchases 32 to 33 million tons of carbon credits annually, which represents less than 0.1% of the global problem, according to the speaker.
- France possesses 2 million hectares of unused agricultural land (idle for five years) legally restricted from other uses; 2CRSI projects this could generate 250,000 new jobs without state funding.
- Current French AI projects aim for over 11 gigawatts of power, potentially consuming 20% of France's 55-gigawatt nuclear capacity, raising concerns about grid stability and energy distribution.
- The company advocates for decentralization into 17 AI factories across Europe (France, Romania, Germany, Czechia, Hungary, Poland) to reduce reliance on single massive sites and minimize expensive long-distance cable infrastructure.
- Sovereignty concerns are highlighted by a case where a European car manufacturer, owned 32% by Chinese investors, faced US restrictions on purchasing AI chips, limiting their access to non-US cloud services.
- The proposed solution involves "black fiber" on-premise data centers for large enterprises, allowing them to run Large Language Models (LLMs) locally without disclosing proprietary R&D data to cloud providers.
- Small and mid-cap companies can utilize services like Goodweek or Outscale to preserve IP security while offloading compute to 2CRSI's sovereign infrastructure.
- 2CRSI's roadmap projects scaling from the current 42 megawatts to 400 megawatts, with plans to deploy 17 sites across Europe by connecting existing partner infrastructure.
- By 2030, 2CRSI has validated three server models designed for space deployment, identifying space as a future frontier for IT.
- The company argues for a generational shift in motivation where innovation is driven by creating a safe, sustainable future and meaningful employment rather than pure profit.