METATHERM · A DIVISION OF ACOUSTIC META MATERIALS · EST. 2024

Phonons. Engineered.

Passive thermal metamaterials for the next generation of AI compute.

DECADES OF AEROSPACE PHYSICS·PASSIVE GEOMETRY·ZERO ACTIVE COMPONENTS

· THE THESIS

MetaTherm is a thermal semiconductor.

A semiconductor controls the direction of electron flow — enabling all of modern computing. MetaTherm applies the same principle to heat. An anisotropic metamaterial composite gives the thermal conductivity tensor fundamentally different values along different axes, creating a strong preferential direction for flow. The wall itself becomes a one-way thermal gate.

EXTREME ANISOTROPY·ONE-WAY THERMAL GATE·ZERO OPERATING ENERGY

· WHY NOW

The thermal limit is the new compute limit.

Accelerator power has crossed the kilowatt line at the package and tens of kilowatts at the rack. Cooling consumes a structural fraction of every facility's electricity, and a few degrees at the die surface erase a generation of compute gains. The constraint is no longer transistors — it is heat.

≈ 40%

OF DATA-CENTER FACILITY POWER GOES TO COOLING[18]

85+TWh/yr

PROJECTED NVIDIA ACCELERATOR DEMAND BY 2027

INDUSTRY PROJECTION

2–3°C

SURFACE RISE THROTTLES MODERN ACCELERATORS BY ~50%

DOCUMENTED ON HOPPER / BLACKWELL CLASS

01 · THE BRIDGE

The same wave equation, three orders of magnitude apart.

A phononic crystal opens a band gap in the dispersion relation at f ≈ c/2a, where c is the speed of sound in the medium and a is the lattice constant. At a = 1 mm, the gap falls in the audible range — the regime AMM has engineered since 2014. At a = 10 nm, it falls in the THz, where thermal phonons carry heat in solids. The mathematics is identical; only the manufacturing process changes.[1][2]

The full derivation →

02 · THE MOMENT

1000W

B200 GPU TDP · NVIDIA BLACKWELL · 2024+[3]

≈ 40%

FACILITY POWER → COOLING OVERHEAD[18]

2–3°C

THERMAL THROTTLE · ~50% PERF DROP

DOCUMENTED ON HOPPER / BLACKWELL

R-6.05 → 18.25

MEASURED ASSEMBLY · COMSOL <1%

AMM THERMAL LAB

1.54 → 1.10

PUE · INDUSTRY-AVG → HYPERSCALER-CLASS[19]

MODELED PROJECTION · 77% ACTIVE COOLING REDUCTION

20–30yr

OPERATING LIFE · NO MOVING PARTS

BUILDING-ENVELOPE LIFECYCLE

Air cooling exits at ~30 kW per rack. Direct-to-chip is bottlenecked above ~80 kW. At a kilowatt per package, the heat-sink stack itself sits on the critical path.[16]

· THREE PARADIGMS

Resist. Remove.
Direct.

Two strategies have dominated thermal management for a century. MetaTherm is a third — a passive material that doesn't just resist heat, it steers it.

Resist

Traditional insulation.

Passive, non-directional. Slows heat transfer in every direction equally. Fiberglass, mineral wool, foam, standard drywall.

PASSIVE · ISOTROPIC · R-2.3 BASELINE

Remove

Liquid cooling.

Active, mechanical. Circulates coolant to extract heat at the chip. Effective at micro scale. Costly plumbing, leak risk, complex retrofit, hardware-specific.

ACTIVE · MECHANICAL · CHIP-LEVEL

Direct

MetaTherm.

Passive and directional. The thermal conductivity tensor takes fundamentally different values along different axes — high resistance inward, higher conductance outward. Solid-state, no fluids, no power. Building-scale, hardware-agnostic.

PASSIVE · ANISOTROPIC · BUILDING-SCALE

Resist slows. Remove extracts. Direct steers. A semiconductor steers electrons. MetaTherm is the same idea, applied to heat.

· MEASURED

Measured,
not modeled.

Two assemblies, identical R-15 batt insulation and 3-inch steel studs. Only the facing material differs. COMSOL prediction agrees with physical measurement within 1%.

The 3× R-value at the assembly level is the macroscopic signature of the underlying tensor anisotropy — the same one-way thermal gating that defines the material at every scale.

Sample

Construction

R measured

R predicted (COMSOL)

Reference

Gypsum facings · R-15 batt · 3-in steel studs

6.05

6.15

<1%

MetaTherm

AMM facings · R-15 batt · 3-in steel studs

18.25

18.87

<1%

Units: °F · ft² · h / Btu

3× thermal resistance

at the assembly level on identical batt insulation. The facing material does the work.

Defeats steel-stud bridging

Steel framing typically destroys 50–60% of an insulation system's nominal R-value. MetaTherm facings restore it.

Lab–simulation under 1%

The physics model predicts the measured behavior. The result is not coincidence.

Source: AMM thermal lab · samples 5 and 6 · COMSOL Multiphysics validation · internal measurement, available on request.

03 · CAPABILITIES

Five families of geometry.
Each with a thermal application.

13 granted US patents · 17 global filings. Each capability below maps a structural geometry our team has engineered to a published thermal analog — the same topology, scaled three orders of magnitude.

01
Enclosures with band-gap tubes
Thermal analog →
Server-rack acoustic liners[5]
02
Sub-wavelength resonator arrays
Thermal analog →
Phononic-crystal heat-flux engineering[6][7]
03
Impedance matching for transducers
Thermal analog →
Thermal boundary conductance engineering[10]
04
Poro-elastic absorbers
Thermal analog →
Nanoporous thermal insulators / cloaks[8]
05
Anisotropic diaphragms
Thermal analog →
Anisotropic heat spreaders[2]

· TWO PRODUCTS

One physics.
Two form factors.

The same anisotropic geometry scales from sub-millimeter films on accelerator packages to drywall-format panels at the building envelope. Both products derive from the same patent family.

SKU 01 · BUILDING-SCALE

MetaTherm Wall

Anisotropic metamaterial drywall, deployed at room and building-envelope scale. The thermal semiconductor at building scale.

R-6.05 → R-18.25 measured
Assembly-level, with R-15 batt and 3-in steel studs.
R-2.3 → R-9.5 panel-only
Direct gypsum-equivalent comparison.
Designed for new-construction integration
Installed in the building envelope at construction. Compatible with retrofit on existing assets.
20–30 year operating life
No moving parts, no fluids, no maintenance cycle. Building-envelope lifecycle.
Cost-competitive with standard commercial insulation at scale
Manufactured in commodity drywall form factors. Underwrite as an envelope upgrade, not a specialty system.
Application
Data-hall walls, hot/cold-aisle containment, building envelope.

PASSIVE · ANISOTROPIC · NO POWER · NO FLUIDS

SKU 02 · COMPONENT-SCALE

MetaTherm Film

Sub-millimeter anisotropic film for component-scale thermal management.

Up to 40 °C surface reduction
Measured on AI-class accelerator packages.
Applies in casing, substrate, or insulation layer
Conforms to existing package geometry.
Solid-state
No external power, no moving parts, no fluids.
Application
Edge AI hardware, GPU/TPU packages, enclosed compute modules.

STATUS · LIVE TRIALS WITH MAJOR EDGE AI OEM PARTNERS

04 · APPLICATIONS

The universal case.

Any large-scale infrastructure project where heat management is an ongoing OPEX line item is a MetaTherm application.

The thermal semiconductor is hardware-agnostic and building-scale. Data centers are the primary surface; the same physics underwrites three more verticals.