Data Center Cooling Pioneer LiquidStack Announces Board Of Directors

Industry veteran Wahid Nawabi, president and CEO of AeroVironment, will serve as Chairman to provide strategic counsel along with other prominent board members 

LiquidStack, the world’s largest liquid cooling company, today announced the formation of its board of directors. Wahid Nawabi, president and CEO of AeroVironment Inc., will serve as Chairman of the Board and Joe Capes, co-founder and CEO of LiquidStack, will serve as Executive Director. Dr. Sunlai Chang, president of Wiwynn, Stijn Ehren, international tax counsel at the Bitfury Group, and Valery Vavilov, co-founder and CEO of Bitfury, will serve as non-executive Directors, effective immediately.

The new board members are industry veterans spanning high-performance computing, Blockchain technology, data center infrastructure, information technology, manufacturing, tax, finance and government relations. Together, they will provide strategic counsel on LiquidStack’s business, growth and global potential. The LiquidStack board is composed of five members, four of whom are independent.

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Wahid Nawabi will bring his extensive experience in launching new products to bear for LiquidStack as the company looks to expand in data centers, edge and high performance computing across the globe.  At AeroVironment, Wahid led the integration of the company’s engineering, operations, supply chain and quality functional organizations into a single corporate shared services model – driving significant improvements in customer satisfaction and operational efficiency. During his tenure at American Power Conversion Corporation (APC), Wahid played a key role in launching the company’s ambitious and successful strategy of entering the data center critical power and cooling infrastructure business. He helped grow the company from $50 million to more than $2.4 billion in annual revenue, which resulted in APC’s eventual sale to Schneider Electric for $6.1 billion (the largest acquisition in the history of Schneider Electric). As Chairman of the Board, Wahid will support LiquidStack’s global growth plans and ambitions.

“After a 16-year career in power and cooling, I am confident that the future of the data center industry is 2-phase immersion cooling. I could not be more excited to serve as Chairman of the Board for LiquidStack, the original pioneer of immersion cooling technology,” said Wahid Nawabi, president and CEO of AeroVironment.

Dr. Sunlai Chang has more than two decades of product development experience from data center IT infrastructure, automation, defense, semiconductor equipment and IT software industries. As president and board member of Wiwynn, LiquidStack’s Series A investor, Sunlai will work closely with the LiquidStack team to deliver state of the art cooling equipment for data centers. He will flex his experience with  product development, product architecture, supply chain, manufacturing, quality engineering and business automation.

“We envision the increasing adoption of the two-phase immersion cooling technology in data centers,” said Dr. Sunlai Chang, president of Wiwynn. ”Following our Series A investment in LiquidStack, we look forward to deepening and strengthening our partnership. It’s my pleasure to join the board to work with LiquidStack’s seasoned leadership team for rapid growth and expansion.”

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Joe Capes has deep roots in the cooling industry. Prior to his current role, Joe was Global Director of Cooling Offer Development for Schneider Electric’s Cloud & Service Provider segment, providing tailored solutions for the world’s largest data center owners and operators. During his 19 years with the company, he globalized Schneider Electric’s data center cooling business in Europe, Asia and Latin America which helped lead to the company’s success as a top manufacturer of mission-critical cooling equipment.  As Executive Director of the board, Joe will lead LiquidStack to scale next generation cooling for compute-intensive applications and the infrastructure supporting them.

“We are pleased to welcome Wahid, Sunlai, Stijn and Valery to the LiquidStack board,” said Joe Capes, co-founder and CEO of LiquidStack. “As Board Chairman, Wahid brings significant experience in manufacturing, supply chain, rapid revenue growth, public offerings, and mergers and acquisitions that will help propel the company forward.”

Stijn Ehren will bring his tax law expertise to the LiquidStack board. Stijn started his career in 1994 at Arthur Andersen in Amsterdam as an international tax advisor, before serving as tax manager for Cisco Systems in Amsterdam and Singapore. Since then, he has led international tax functions for established pharmaceutical companies, including Akzo Nobel and Merck. Today, he serves as international tax counsel at the Bitfury Group.

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Valery Vavilov has long been a proponent of liquid cooling, deploying the first and largest immersion-cooled data centers using LiquidStack’s 2-phase immersion technology. Bitfury incubated LiquidStack for five years, deploying hyperscale volumes of product with a laser focus on liquid cooling for Blockchain technology applications. Now that LiquidStack has launched as an independent company, it will continue to have a close partnership with Bitfury. Through cross-licensing arrangement, the companies are already collaborating on new liquid cooling projects related to crypto-mining and artificial intelligence.