JOURNEY TOWARD IMPACT
From Europe to Canada: Sustainable solutions that work
Journey Toward Impact is a series highlighting partnerships facilitated by the European Union-funded Low Carbon and Circular Economy Business Action in Canada (LCBA Canada) project. By connecting European cleantech innovators with Canadian companies and communities, LCBA Canada helps turn promising ideas into real partnerships that support decarbonisation and a circular economy transition. Submer’s journey — from a Barcelona start-up to a cooling partner for Canada’s fast-growing data-centre sector — is one example of how European innovation, backed by EU-supported collaboration, is creating tangible impact across the Atlantic.
From a Backyard Pool in Barcelona to Cooling Canada’s AI Boom
Some companies begin with a business plan. Submer began in a paddling pool. Eleven years ago, on a hot Catalonian day, two friends were cooling off in a kiddie pool when one turned to the other with a question that would become a company: what if we could do the same with servers? One of them knew the problem very well - he had built his own data centre by the age of 18 and sold it to Telefónica, experiencing first-hand how much energy it took simply to stop the machines overheating.
“They were literally just sitting in a pool,” recalls Gabriel Lazar, Submer’s Head of Sustainability. They could not use water on live servers, of course, so the first experiments used special non-conductive fluids. From that improbable start grew a decade of serious engineering: the technology is now on its fifth or sixth iteration, refined through real large-scale deployments. “It’s quite a lot of trying, tinkering and adapting to the realities of a real data centre,” Gabriel says.
Headquartered in Barcelona and now around 150 people strong, Submer has grown into one of the recognised names in liquid cooling for data centres. The company has gone well beyond the technology itself, now looking at the data centre end to end because, as Gabriel puts it, “everything has an impact on everything else.”
A smarter way to handle the heat
To understand why immersion cooling matters, it helps to start with a piece of first-principles physics: there is no such thing as cooling, only the removal of heat, which can be moved from one place to another but never destroyed. In a conventional data centre, that job is done with air: cool air is drawn through each server, picks up the heat, and is carried away by a chilled-water circuit and air-conditioning units that reject it to the atmosphere. The method is proven, but it is energy-consuming and depends on refrigerant gases that are harmful if they escape.
It is also reaching its limits. A typical server rack produces 8 to 9 kilowatts of heat, but the racks built for artificial intelligence run at 120 to 150 kilowatts - more than fifteen times as much - and their chips begin to fail above 80–90°C. Beyond a certain density, air simply cannot carry the heat away fast enough. Submer’s answer, its modular SmartPod immersion systems, is to submerge the servers directly in a non-conductive liquid that absorbs and moves heat far more effectively, removing the need, in many cases, for mechanical refrigeration altogether.
The efficiency gains are substantial. The design brings direct water use close to zero, runs in a closed loop with no evaporation, and holds up year-round even in hot, dry climates such as Arizona or Valencia, not only the cool northern regions where data centres have traditionally clustered. Waste heat, rather than being discarded, can be captured and reused.
Crossing the Atlantic
Submer never waited for the market to come to it. From its Barcelona headquarters, with further sites in Houston and Taipei and teams reaching into the Middle East and India, it expects to roughly double in size over the coming year. So it was receptive when, at a cleantech investment forum in Spain Gabriel Lazar met the team of the Low Carbon Business Action Canada project. Their conversation kept returning to a theme now reshaping the industry: sovereignty.
Increasingly, countries want their data - and the artificial intelligence built on it - to stay within their own borders, in their own languages and under their own control. It also suits the way Submer prefers to work: localising each project regionally, often through joint ventures, so that control and compliance remain in local hands. Canada itself is clear-eyed about this: not a superpower, but a country that knows it needs trusted partners and a cleaner, denser, more efficient way to build the data centres that sovereign AI demands.
Through that matchmaking, Submer has signed several Letters of Intent with Canadian data-centre companies looking to do things differently — the first concrete steps toward bringing the technology across the Atlantic. Currently, discussions are under way to widen the partnership to other companies across the country.
Both sides contribute, both sides benefit
With this kind of partnership, value flows in both directions. Submer cannot build and run Canadian data centres from Barcelona: it needs local presence, local partners and local trust. In return, it brings a technology proven over more than a decade, deep sustainability expertise, and a product line for a Canadian partner to take to market. The Canadian side brings market knowledge, on-the-ground capacity, a broad network and, in several cases, a clear goal of sovereign, community-led infrastructure. Both sides contribute; both sides benefit.
“One of the most rewarding parts of our work is seeing how a single introduction can grow into a real partnership. By connecting European innovators with Canadian partners, we help sustainable solutions move from idea to real-world impact.”
Jose Canjura, Project Team Leader, LCBA Canada
These partnerships also demonstrate the broader objective of the European Union’s support for LCBA Canada: helping innovative European SMEs expand internationally while contributing to Canada’s transition to a more sovereign and circular digital economy.
What happens next
For all the momentum, Gabriel is honest about where things stand. The conversations are advanced, but, as with any major infrastructure decision, a lot of it “still has to materialise - clients still need to touch and feel it.” The next step is to move from Letters of Intent toward real deployments on Canadian soil, with the LCBA Canada project helping to accelerate the go-to-market. It is, in the end, a question of being in the right place at the right time - and, after a decade of patient engineering, Submer believes it is.
A journey toward impact
It is a long way from a paddling pool in Barcelona to the data centres powering Canada’s AI ambitions. Submer is at an inflection point - around 150 people, expanding fast, and, in its own words, watching its pipeline “explode in all directions.” But the conviction that started it has not changed: that the infrastructure of the digital age can be built to last 30 or 40 years, efficiently and sustainably, rather than thrown up for today alone. For Submer and its Canadian partners, these agreements mark the beginning of a journey toward impact, where European innovation and Canadian leadership meet to build a cleaner, more sovereign digital future.