UniSCool: EIC Accelerator Bet on Self-Adjusting Chip Cooling

The liquid cold plates that cool server processors have high pressure drops and uneven temperatures and cannot adapt to changing heat loads, according to a 2024 EU project report written by the company that wants to replace them. Universal Smart Cooling, which trades as UniSCool, puts small fins in the coolant channel that deform as they warm up. The EIC project summary says they add turbulence only at a chip's hotspots, and the earlier project said this avoids overcooling and cuts pumping power. The company says it needs no sensors and no actuators.

The EIC Accelerator selected the project, SMART COOL FINS, at its October 2025 cut-off for blended finance. CORDIS records a grant agreement signed on 28 May 2026 and an EU contribution of €2,498,426.70 for 1 June 2026 to 31 May 2028. Five months into a two-year project, what can be checked is the underlying research, a prize from the data centre industry and the company's own pilot figures. What cannot yet be checked is whether anyone buys the product.

Fins that bend with temperature

The idea comes out of a long run of work at the University of Lleida. In 2022 the group published a paper in Applied Thermal Engineering on the design and test of shape memory alloy fins for a self-adaptive liquid cooling device, with Vilarrubí, Barrau and Fréchette among the authors. A 2024 paper in the International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer modelled self-adaptive fins acting as vortex generators inside micro heat sinks. In October 2025 the Open Compute Project, the industry body behind open data centre hardware, gave UniSCool the best paper award and $10,000 at its Future Technologies Symposium for a paper titled "Disruptive Cold Plate Configuration with Self-adaptive Fins for Local Control of Heat Extraction Capacity".

The established alternatives, as the company names them, are microchannel cold plates and jet impingement. The SMART COOL FINS summary describes the fins as deforming with temperature and adding turbulence only at hotspots. The company website lists three products, Smart Cool One, Smart Cool Plus and Smart Cool Fins, says the system can dissipate up to 2,000 W, and offers a "Try & Buy" scheme that it marks as launched.

The size of the saving depends on who states it. The website says up to 50% against microchannel or jet impingement cooling, and Capital Riesgo reported up to 50% against current solutions. Diari Catalunya reported up to 70%, the figure the 2024 CORDIS report gives against air-cooled systems. The EIC project summary says cooling energy can fall by up to 80%. These are different baselines, not one measurement, and no independent test of the commercial product has been published.

The first EU project changed course

Before the EIC, the company ran a one-year Women TechEU project, also called UniSCool, with €75,000 of EU money from July 2023 to June 2024. Its aim was more ambitious than a cold plate: an adaptive cooling system embedded in the chip stack itself, with targets of more than 1 kW/cm² of heat extraction, half the flow rate and pumping power, and a tenth of the space.

The periodic report is candid. The team could not fully develop self-adaptive fins at that scale and switched to an array of microfluidic cells with thermally driven self-adaptive valves. A prototype was made at the Université de Sherbrooke, all four milestones are reported as reached, and the report says the prototype showed that high heat extraction with a reduced pressure drop is feasible. It publishes no test measurements. Fins remain the basis of the cold plate design that the OCP prize recognised and that the EIC is now funding.

What SMART COOL FINS promises

The project summary frames the problem as a data centre one: cooling takes about 40% of data centre electricity, which it values at €19 billion a year worldwide, while AI and high-performance computing push power density up. It reports pilots at Sanitas and Mediacloud with a 30% reduction in server power and 50% lower flow rates. Diari Catalunya names the partners testing the system as Mediapro of Barcelona and Sanitas, so the two sources disagree on one pilot partner's name. Neither source publishes the pilot data, and the company has announced no customer contract.

The commercial targets in the summary are a €29 billion data centre cooling market by 2030, an addressable market of €7.25 billion and a serviceable one of €2.9 billion, and €50 million of sales by 2031, about 33,000 units. Those are the company's projections in its application, not figures the EIC verified. Co-founder Montse Vilarrubí told Diari Catalunya that the support "is a decisive step to accelerate the industrialization of our technology", and the same report said the money is meant to take the product from prototype to commercial use and to triple the workforce.

1. Self-adaptive fins that work in a cold platePublished2022 and 2024 journal papers and the OCP best paper of October 2025.
2. Energy saving of up to 80%ClaimFigures range from 50% to 80% across sources; no independent test published.
3. 30% server power cut in pilotsCompany figureStated in the CORDIS summary; pilot data not published, one partner named differently in press.
4. Industrial product and salesToo earlyProject runs to May 2028; no customer contract announced by 4 November 2026.

Small grants, then the EIC

The company's public money before the EIC came in small amounts. CORDIS records the €75,000 Women TechEU grant. Corresponsables reported a €15,000 entrepreneurship prize from Fundación Caja de Ingenieros in January 2024. The website and a CDTI interview of October 2025 confirm a Neotec subsidy from Spain's innovation agency, financed with EU recovery funds, but neither gives the amount.

Capital Riesgo reported that UniSCool was the first company to obtain EIC Accelerator funding through the Plug-in route, under which the Catalan agency ACCIÓ's Startup Capital grant let it skip the first stage of evaluation, and that the award includes up to €2.5 million of EIC Fund co-investment. CORDIS records only the grant, and no EIC Fund investment in the company has been announced. Ecosistema Startup, rewriting an El Economista report of August 2025, said the company planned to raise €14 million within 18 months to expand into Europe, the United States and Canada. No closed private round has been announced since, and eight Lleida editions of the mercantile gazette from 2024 to 2026 checked for this article carry no entry for the company. That is a limit of the search, not proof that none happened.

Why the EU cares about chip cooling

The project is tagged at 40% each for the digital agenda, clean air, artificial intelligence and climate action. The project's case is that cooling takes a large share of data centre electricity, so a cheaper way to cool processors would serve both the EU's climate targets and the growth of AI computing in Europe. The recognition so far is mostly academic and regional: on 20 February 2026 the University of Lleida announced a Catalan national research prize for creating the company, and the EIC listed Vilarrubí among 18 semi-finalists for its 2026 Prize for Women Innovators. She is not among the nine finalists announced later.

UniSCool was not asked for comment for this article. The reporting is based on publicly available sources, listed below.