Leading liquid cooling enterprise Yixintong has completed a financing of several hundred million yuan, which is led by BP, the global energy giant from the United Kingdom.

Recently, Beijing Yixintong Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Yixintong"), a high-tech enterprise in the ICT liquid cooling sector, officially announced that its hundreds of millions of RMB Series B financing is led by Castrol, a subsidiary of global energy giant BP, with joint investment from CRRC Capital, Zhongbo Juli and E-Share Capital. Yunqiu Capital acted as the exclusive financial advisor for this round and the long-term financial advisor for subsequent follow-up financing.

After the completion of this round of financing, Yixintong has been transformed into a foreign-invested enterprise. The raised funds will be mainly invested in core product R&D, production capacity expansion and overseas market layout, and its Malaysia plant has been completed and put into operation. Notably, this round of financing is not a pure financial investment — Yixintong and Castrol, a subsidiary of BP, have simultaneously signed a legally binding commercial cooperation agreement, extending the cooperation from the capital level to in-depth strategic synergy in brand, channels, supply chain and the global market.

Beyond Investment: A Strategic Cooperation of "Capital + Order + Brand"

The lead investor of this round, BP, is a world-leading integrated energy company with business operations across the globe, and is actively promoting the transition to low-carbon and integrated energy. Its subsidiary Castrol boasts a 126-year brand history, and has continued to increase its investment in the data center thermal management sector in recent years — it has set up liquid cooling research centers in the UK and China, and built an industry-leading thermal management laboratory in Shanghai, launching end-to-end liquid cooling solutions covering single-phase immersion and cold plate technologies for the Chinese market.

This is far more than a financial investment: the cooperation between BP and Yixintong is an in-depth strategic synergy featuring "capital + order + brand":

Order Synergy — As agreed by both parties, Castrol will purchase hundreds of millions of RMB worth of thermal management hardware and services from Yixintong within 5 years. Castrol aims to become an asset management company in the AIDC sector, investing in data center thermal design, hardware equipment, system integration and other links with its own capital, while not engaging in hardware manufacturing itself — Yixintong is its only invested liquid cooling manufacturing partner, and will be entitled to the priority supply right for corresponding data center liquid cooling and related products. Meanwhile, Yixintong will also provide Castrol with services including data center machine room design and hardware ODM manufacturing.

Production Capacity Synergy — In terms of the ongoing overseas plant construction of Yixintong, Castrol will provide assistance in site selection suggestions, systematic operation and other aspects.

Empowered by Global Resources to Tap into High-Growth Overseas Markets

For Yixintong, which is committed to global expansion, BP brings a ready-made global network.

Channel Network: Castrol's sales and after-sales network covers 128 countries around the world, accumulating tens of thousands of customer, supplier and partner resources. Through the in-depth binding of equity integration and commercial agreements, Yixintong can establish direct and efficient first-hand connections with overseas scarce resources — an advantage that is difficult for its liquid cooling peers that build their own overseas networks to match. At present, Castrol has facilitated Yixintong to obtain the opportunity to establish a joint certification laboratory with Intel and the agreement has been signed.

Customer Resources: Castrol is a supplier of leading overseas cloud service providers such as AWS and Microsoft, and will assist Yixintong in securing data center business orders from overseas cloud service providers.

Full-Stack Layout of Liquid Cooling, Staying Firmly in the Domestic First-Tier Camp

Founded in 2021, Yixintong has grown into a top-tier player in China's liquid cooling industry in just a few years — currently, there are only four enterprises on the liquid cooling "white list" of leading internet and server manufacturers in China, and Yixintong is the only non-listed enterprise among them, firmly ranking in the first echelon of non-listed liquid cooling enterprises.

The company integrates R&D and production, solution provision and full-lifecycle liquid cooling services, and has mastered the two mainstream technical paths of cold plate and immersion liquid cooling. Its product matrix covers full-stack categories including CDU (Cooling Distribution Unit), Manifold, TANK (Immersion Liquid Cooling Tank), liquid cooling container data center and prefabricated pipelines. Its customers almost cover all leading clients in China's liquid cooling sector, with in-depth cooperation with top domestic internet and cloud service enterprises, mainstream server OEMs, leading IDC operators and basic telecom operators. Up to now, the total scale of liquid cooling projects delivered by the company has exceeded 1.5GW, and the equipment has been operating stably for more than 10 million hours without failure in total.

Compared with its peers, the unique advantage of Yixintong lies in that all its founding team members come from the internet and data center industry — they have transformed from data center users to data center builders, so they have a more direct understanding of customer pain points, and provide one-stop full-lifecycle services covering "planning and design — delivery — operation and maintenance".

With Solid R&D Foundation, the Company Has Built a 2.5MW Liquid Cooling Laboratory of Leading Scale in China

Liquid cooling is not a standard product that "can be used immediately after installation" — every chip upgrade and every architecture difference of server manufacturers means that the solution needs to be redesigned and re-verified. This is not only a technical threshold, but also a competitive moat.

Yixintong has long maintained high-intensity R&D investment. The company has built a 2.5MW liquid cooling laboratory of leading scale in China, supported by a material laboratory, a reliability verification and testing center, and a 24,000-square-meter self-operated "Yixin Jinggong" intelligent manufacturing factory. All links including R&D, process, production, procurement and testing are fully optimized in its own system. It has owned more than 50 core intellectual property rights, participated in the formulation of 4 liquid cooling industry standards, and is a participating unit of industry benchmark documents such as the Technical Specification for Data Center Liquid Cooling System. The company has also passed four international management system certifications including ISO 9001, ISO 14001, ISO 45001 and ISO 3834, and its core products have obtained UL and CE international certifications.

Global Layout to Target New Overseas Computing Power Demands

The overseas liquid cooling market is about 20 times the size of the domestic market, with product price gaps of several times, which is the largest increment for liquid cooling enterprises in the next stage. Yixintong has set up an overseas business platform in Singapore, and its R&D and production base in Malaysia has been completed and put into operation. Its business and after-sales network covers six regions: Southeast Asia, East Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe and the Americas. Its overseas business has been implemented in many national-level computing power projects and multinational data center operators, and the target proportion of overseas revenue in the future will exceed 50%. After this round of financing, relying on BP's global resource network and joint brand system, the company will further focus on core regions such as Asia-Pacific, Europe, America and the Middle East, build a localized service and operation system, and expand its global professional talent team simultaneously.

Zhang Xia, Founder and CEO of Yixintong, said: "BP's lead investment is an important milestone in the company's globalization journey. This round of financing brings us not only funds, but also a channel network covering 128 countries and an order commitment of hundreds of millions of yuan for 5 years. The global energy giant's increased investment in the liquid cooling track confirms our judgment on the industry direction: liquid cooling is not an "optional course" for energy saving, but a "required course" and infrastructure in the AI computing power era. In the future, we will cooperate in depth with BP and Castrol, to deliver Chinese liquid cooling technology to the global intelligent computing infrastructure. Our mission remains unchanged: to make computing power cooler, more efficient and more inclusive."