BY JACKIE KEOGH

WEST Cork company Nexalus was featured in Time magazine in recognition of a new invention that reduces energy consumption in data centres.

‘The innovation, which is a cooling device that sits on a computer chip, recaptures 95% of the energy used and makes it available for other industrial uses,’ said Cathal Wilson, who is a co-founder of the company and its chief operating officer.

Bridie Corrigan Matthews, Taste 4 Success Skillnet and Rachel Delaney, Pathway to Innovate.

Cathal left the family’s business Ceramicx in Ballydehob in 2017 to form Nexalus alongside Professor Anthony Robinson and Kenneth O’Mahony.

They established a headquarters in Cork city, but they also have a few other bases: one in Cork, one at Trinity College, and one in an innovation centre in Castlepollard in Westmeath.

Mary Byrne, IRDG and Andrew De Juan, MTU - Nimbus.

Cathal explained that it was an article in the Economist magazine that sparked his interest in this area of development, and inspired him to take a new direction in life.

The article in question was about the air cooling of data centres, which is the standard method of cooling these high energy consumption centres, but it didn’t make any sense to Cathal.

‘I started investigating it further. That led to Tony and I being awarded a commercialisation fund from Enterprise Ireland,’ he added.

James Leigh, R&D Tax Solutions and Tim Garde, Cork Chamber.

Then Trinity College hired Cathal, who was already an adjunct professor, to manage a project to develop a new cooling system for these centres.

Over a 12-month period, four patents were registered and Nexalus exclusively licensed the technology from Trinity College.

The upward trajectory of the company continued when Nexalus became an Enterprise Ireland ‘high potential start-up’, or HPS, and secured investor funding.

Since then, the company has established global partnerships with Dell, HPE and Intel, and it is in the process of launching products that will have a significant impact on how data centres will operate in the future.

Not a lot of people know that within the last two years, Nexalus’s high performing systems have also been used as cooling systems by the majority of Formula 1 teams.

Kenneth O’Mahony, chief executive officer, Professor Anthony Robinson, chief science officer, and Dr Cathal Wilson, chief operating officer, of Nexalus. (Photos: Andy Gibson)

‘Formula 1 is a massively demanding industry, so, in a way, it’s like having a high-octane research and development platform,’ said Cathal, who admits it has helped to bring the company to international prominence.

Time magazine listed what it considers to be the inventions of the year and it featured Nexalus because their product not only dramatically cuts energy consumption, it also allows thermal energy recovery.

Nexalus is a science and engineering company that develops technology and its associated prototypes. But it has a manufacturing partner in Millstreet called Alps Alpine that enables them to bring their products to market.

There are about 370 people employed at Alps Alpine and, according to Cathal Wilson, Nexalus products are expected to increase employment further at the Cork plant in the near future as the demand for sustainability products grows both on the domestic market and on the wider market internationally.