The Coral Thermal Stack
Ten layers. Twenty bill-of-materials lines. One documented decision at every one. Coral models AI infrastructure as ten thermal and energy layers, from the silicon junction to the carbon ledger. Four of those ten layers Coral buys outright rather than engineering, and every layer page states which decision was taken and why.
Coral models AI infrastructure as ten thermal and energy layers, from the silicon junction to the carbon ledger. Most vendors sell one or two of these layers and treat the rest as somebody else's problem. Coral's position is that thermal performance is a property of the whole path, and that optimising a cold plate while ignoring the approach temperature of a heat exchanger four layers away is how the industry arrived at facilities that spend a third of their power on cooling.
The ten layers
| Layer | Name | The engineering question | Coral's position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Compute | Which accelerators, in which form factor, and does the thermal architecture follow the silicon or lead it? | Buy. Coral adds nothing by touching this layer and risks a great deal. |
| 2 | Component thermal | How does heat leave a 2 kW package before the junction throttles? | Partner for the mainstream path. Build one owned geometry. |
| 3 | Pod thermal environment | What removes the heat that never reaches a cold plate? | Coral's own architecture. Fluid is qualified, never formulated. |
| 4 | Secondary loop | How does heat leave the pod, at what temperature, and in what medium? | Buy the components. Own the temperature strategy. |
| 5 | Heat rejection | How does heat leave the building without consuming water? | Buy. Match the technology to the climate. |
| 6 | Heat recovery | Who buys the heat, at what grade, under what contract? | Build the commercial product. Buy the equipment. |
| 7 | Thermal intelligence | What is measured, how often, and what acts on it? | Partner for the control agent. Own everything underneath it. |
| 8 | Energy optimisation | How does the pod behave as a grid asset rather than a grid load? | Partner. Own the fleet aggregation layer. |
| 9 | Orchestration | How is a distributed fleet operated, simulated and guaranteed? | Partner for the engine. Build the product. |
| 10 | Sustainability | What is the measured water, carbon and lifecycle position, and who verified it? | Build, then have it independently validated. |
Four of these ten layers Coral buys outright, and says so. A company that claims to have invented every layer of its own stack is either misallocating capital or not being straight. The interesting question is which layers a company chose to own, and why. Coral's are layers 3, 6, 7, 9 and 10, and the reasoning is on each page.
Read a layer in full.
Where to go next
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