Cambridge Future Tech and Arup sign MoU to develop Deep Rack Venture Studio to revolutionise data centre infrastructure

Cambridge Future Tech (CFT), a leader in scientific venture building, and Arup, a renowned consultancy in the built environment sector, have formalised their partnership through a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU). This collaboration focuses on launching the Deep Rack Venture Studio, an initiative aimed at fostering 16 new startups to address pressing challenges faced by global data centre infrastructure.

The Deep Rack Venture Studio is dedicated to tackling vital bottlenecks in data centre systems, including performance, resilience, efficiency, and sustainability. The studio's focus areas cover crucial elements such as cooling, energy use, structural density, and circularity. These are key concerns that frequently hinder or delay the expansion of critical infrastructure.

New data centres face obstacles like planning issues, water consumption doubts, grid capacity shortages, and an increasing demand to curtail energy and material waste. Concurrently, existing facilities are struggling with heightened demand due to old cooling systems, limited power availability, and inflexible infrastructures.

Set to commence in 2026, the studio is actively inviting strategic partners to join the mission, offering early access to groundbreaking technologies that will define the future of computing capabilities.

CFT and Arup bring a rich array of expertise to this venture. CFT is known for identifying pioneering academic research and building successful companies from it through its structured spinout process. Meanwhile, Arup contributes its extensive experience in designing and managing high-performance data centres worldwide, ensuring new technology innovations that are both resilient and scalable.

The venture studio promises to move breakthrough science from lab to market, as Steve Raffe from CFT highlighted the bottlenecks in power, heat, and space that the global data centre industry faces. Gareth Williams from Arup also emphasised CFT's ability to scale these innovations, reinforcing that the studio aims to solve challenges surrounding power, cooling, and carbon emissions in digital infrastructure.

Applying CFT's Scientific Venture Creation process, the studio can draw upon previous success stories such as Literal Labs and Dew Point Systems. These companies have set benchmarks for efficiency and performance, with Arup's vast expertise ensuring that technology selection prioritises resilience, scalability, and sustainability.