Hayzel winning the Cooling and Thermal category at the 2026 Data Center World ‘Innovation Challenge, Powered by ABB’.
For most people, cooling equipment is invisible, a background system quietly doing its job like it has for decades to tame the that heat data centers produce. But for Hayzel, a six-person startup, this environment offered a chance to rethink how chillers operate inside data centers.
Co-founder Matt Price says Hayzel is focused on a simple but overlooked opportunity: placing small turbines attached to existing cooling systems to recover energy that is currently wasted.
Hayzel develops a turbine that converts the expansion of the refrigerant in a commercial chiller into carbon-free electricity and additional cooling capacity. In standard chillers, a refrigerant expands in a valve which causes it to become cold, but no work is done during the expansion process. With Hayzel’s solution the refrigerant expands in the Hayzel turbine. As the refrigerant expands it rotates the turbine connected to a generator thereby generating usable electricity while also improving the chiller's overall efficiency.
In effect, the company is turning chillers into energy-recovering systems — or, as Price describes it, “miniature power plants.”
Hayzel won the Cooling and Thermal category at the 2026 Data Center World Innovation Challenge powered by ABB. The Innovation Challenge brought together 24 startups to pitch their data center innovations Shark Tank-style to a panel of judges, with winners selected across multiple categories for their potential impact on next-generation infrastructure.
A Customer With a ‘Hair on Fire' Problem
Price’s team had this product idea, and then they found what startups need most. “We found a customer with a hair on fire problem,” Price says. “And that was data centers.”
Founded at the end of 2024, Hayzel built its first turbine in 2025 and deployed it at a California data center later that year. Since then, the system has been operating in one of the facility’s primary chillers while the company works with third-party partners to validate energy savings and performance improvements.
For a young company with just six employees across the US and Europe, early traction has been encouraging. But Price says Hayzel has deliberately avoided early publicity as it establishes a performance record: “Our general view was: we need to prove it first.”
The Hidden Inefficiency in Cooling Systems
Cooling is a strategic pillar in the AI data center infrastructure because AI workloads have dramatically changed the thermal profile of today’s facilities. Rack densities that once sat around 5 to 10kW now routinely hit 40kW, 100kW, and beyond. Higher compute density means more heat, placing enormous pressure on cooling systems.
At the same time, energy prices are rising, grid constraints are tightening electricity access, and operators are racing to deploy AI capacity as quickly as possible.
The scramble for AI capacity and performance sent the data center industry looking for better power and thermal management solutions. For Hayzel, it also exposed a longstanding inefficiency inside traditional cooling systems.
While cooling technology has become increasingly sophisticated, a lot of data center cooling still relies on the vapor compression cycle. Compressors pressurize refrigerant, raising its temperature, and then expand to cool it and remove heat from buildings. While compressors and heat exchangers have been heavily optimized over decades, Price argues the expansion process has remained largely unchanged for many operators.
“The thermodynamics say you’re losing about 20% to 25% of the compressor energy during that expansion process,” he says. Hayzel’s turbine is designed to recover part of that lost energy and convert it into electricity and additional cooling capacity.
Designed for Retrofit and Operational Safety
Data centers are mission-critical environments, and operators are understandably cautious about introducing unfamiliar systems where downtime can have major consequences.
To address this, Hayzel designed its technology to integrate alongside existing infrastructure rather than replace it. The company’s website touts that the system can be installed in less than a week.
“When we retrofit our turbine, we leave the existing expansion valve and control systems in place,” Price says. That fail-safe design has become central to Hayzel’s approach since it reduces risk. “'The Hayzel system is installed in parallel to the chiller’s expansion valve. Therefore, if there are any issues with the Hayzel system, the refrigerant is automatically diverted back to the expansion valve.”
Proving Performance Through Measurement
Hayzel has placed heavy emphasis on measurement and verification — a key requirement for operators evaluating new cooling technologies.
Because the system generates measurable electricity directly from refrigerant flow, its performance can be isolated using utility-grade power meters. The company is also working with third-party verification partners to compare compressor loads with and without the turbine in operation.
“Technologies that get massively adopted are usually simple, reliable, and cost effective,” he says. “And when speed matters, they need to work with the systems that already exist.”
While emerging concepts such as immersion cooling and alternative data center architectures continue to generate interest, Price believes adoption ultimately depends on integration and practicality.
“Kudos to the engineers trying to make manufacturing compute work in zero gravity,” says Price, referencing proposals for space-based data centers. “But mass adoption usually comes from solutions that integrate into the infrastructure we already have.”
The Future of Cooling Inside Dense Compute Environments
Even as sophisticated cooling technologies such as liquid cooling advance, data centers will need a range of strategies and equipment to meet the soaring densities they’re pursuing.
“They’re still four walls meant to manufacture compute,” Price says. “Operators are going to keep pushing the envelope on how much compute they can fit inside those walls.”
What will change is everything around that compute, and particularly how heat and power are managed across increasingly dense environments.
For Hayzel, that challenge represents a chance to rethink an overlooked element in this indispensable infrastructure.