Liquid-cooling cold plates
Precision-flat OFHC copper or 6061-T6 with internal flow channels. Direct-to-chip cooling for 1+ kW density rack hardware. Flatness 0.0005″ over 12″.
Industries · Super Computing
When the chip dissipates 1 kW, the cold plate has to be perfect.
High-performance computing and AI training pushed thermal density past what air-cooling can handle. Direct-to-chip liquid cooling demands cold plates flat to 0.0005″ over a foot. We machine cold plates, heat exchangers, optical packaging, and chassis hardware for HPC, hyperscaler, and exascale-class customers.
Flatness class
0.0005″
Materials
OFHC · 6061 · MIC-6
Surface Ra
8–16 µin
Volume range
10 → 5K
01 · Why HPC needs precision machining
Heat is the whole problem.
A modern AI training accelerator dissipates 700 W to 1.2 kW per chip. A rack of them dissipates 80–120 kW. Air-cooling capped out years ago — direct-to-chip liquid cooling and immersion are the only paths forward. The cold plate sitting on the chip is the single most precision-critical interface in the rack.
That cold plate has to hold 0.0005″ flatness over its full footprint, achieve 8–16 µin Ra surface finish for thermal-interface-material wetting, and survive vibration and pressure cycling. We machine those plates in OFHC copper and 6061-T6, validate flatness on the Hexagon Global S CMM, and provide CMM scan data with each lot.
02 · Components we make
From the chip up.
Custom heat exchangers
Micro-finned aluminum, copper-skived, brazed plate-fin assemblies. Thermal-test fixtured. CFD-validated geometries machined to spec.
Optical-transceiver housings
Silicon photonics packaging — fiber-array housings, lens-mount alignment fixtures, hermetic sub-mounts. 0.0001″ alignment-critical features.
Server chassis & sleds
1U/2U/4U sleds, GPU-mount backplanes, NVMe carriers, cable management. 5052/6061 with anodize.
Test & metrology fixtures
Wafer probes, package-test sockets, thermal-shock fixtures, bond-pull testers. 0.0001″ positional, validated to gauge R&R.
Vibration-isolation hardware
Damped mounts, pneumatic-isolation interfaces, precision spring carriers. Spec to picometer-class metrology environments.
03 · Customer profile
Hyperscalers, national labs, AI infrastructure.
Our HPC work spans hyperscaler data-center hardware, DOE national-lab exascale systems, AI training infrastructure, and silicon-photonics packaging. The thermal-and-precision discipline we built for aerospace transfers directly — same Hexagon Global S CMM, same SensFlo process monitoring, same DFM rigor.
Imagery: ORNL Frontier exascale supercomputer (Carlos Jones / ORNL / DOE, public domain).
04 · Off our floor
Aluminum fin-array work — actual production parts.
Precision-machined fin geometry for cooling and heat-exchanger applications. Tight pitch, consistent fin thickness, uniform surface finish across the array — what direct-to-chip thermal interfaces actually require in production.
Customer-specific dimensions, materials, and end-application held under NDA.
Building HPC hardware that needs precision metalwork?
Cold plates, heat exchangers, photonics housings — send drawings or a STEP file with thermal/optical requirements. Production-volume capable.
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