Scaleway announces the acquisition of Qarnot, a company specialized in high-performance computing (HPC) for engineering, simulation, and research.
With this acquisition, Scaleway expands its cloud and AI platform by adding a dedicated HPC offering alongside its existing cloud and artificial intelligence services.
Qarnot has developed a direct liquid cooling technology for servers. According to the company, this method enables the recovery of up to 95% of the heat generated by HPC servers, without impacting the computing performance. This recovered heat is then reinjected into urban heating networks, public facilities, or industrial sites.
Liquid cooling and heat recovery
Qarnot counts MaiaSpace, Alpine Racing, Natixis, and ATR Aircraft among its clients. Its platform is used for complex simulations with validation cycles shortened from several days to a few hours, and a compute capacity that can be adjusted on demand, without relying on an internal cluster.
The two companies rely on the standards of the Open Compute Project for the design of their infrastructures.
Damien Lucas, CEO of Scaleway, says the challenge now is to valorize the energy consumed by computation beyond its mere efficiency, and Qarnot’s expertise in heat-recovery from waste heat fits within this logic.
The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
In June, Scaleway had already acquired Saagie, which develops a DataOps platform enabling automation, orchestration, and oversight of data projects across their entire lifecycle, from collection to exploitation.
