Omen AI Buys Aquatic Labs to Combine Two Ways of Testing Data Center Coolant
Omen AI is acquiring competitor Aquatic Labs in a $16 million cash-and-stock deal, according to TechCrunch. The two companies monitor fluid chemistry in liquid-cooled data centers, but they measure different things. Omen's sensors detect elements in water. Aquatic Labs' sensor tests alkalinity, the water's capacity to resist pH swings. The combined company expects to have an integrated sensor that does both on the market by early next year.
Omen AI was founded in 2024 and describes itself as a continuous fluid analysis company. Its founder, Zach Laberge, dropped out of college to build a company that analyzes fluids in the hydraulic systems of large construction machines. Aquatic Labs is led by CEO Allan Adams, a trained physicist who developed ocean sensing technology as an MIT professor and as a researcher at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Under the combined company, Adams will serve as chief science officer.
The acquisition follows a funding round. In June, Omen AI raised a $31 million Series A led by Nava Ventures, according to a company press release, bringing its total funding to $41.5 million. Coverage of the round reported that the Series A funds monitoring of chip coolant and the prevention of bacterial outbreaks in data centers, per Yahoo Finance.
The company's current product is Omen Sentry, a device for continuous coolant analysis in liquid-cooled facilities. According to the Omen AI website, Sentry monitors pH, total alkalinity, glycol concentration (the antifreeze additive in the loop), conductivity, temperature and pressure. The unit is a 4U, 19-inch rack-mount device that fits a standard equipment cabinet. It installs via parallel bypass, meaning it sits beside the cooling loop rather than in its main path, using 1/2-inch OCP UQD08 quick-disconnect connections. It integrates with facility building management systems over Modbus TCP/IP, a common industrial networking protocol. Omen's team works across San Francisco, Orange County and Boston.
The scale motivating the deal is measured in water. According to the Water Foundation, as cited by TechCrunch, U.S. data centers use 17 to 19 billion gallons of water per year to cool chips, and that usage is expected to triple over the next five years. Omen's initial sensors will monitor chips drawing 250 to 300 MW of power by the end of the year, and the company aims to be installed on the equivalent of 1 GW of chips by the end of 2027.
Those targets are company plans, not completed deployments, and the integrated sensor is an expectation with a timeline, not a shipping product.
In my view, the more useful question for operators is what the combined data reveals about the loop itself. Element concentrations and alkalinity both drift over time, and a cooling loop whose chemistry shifts without notice becomes a reliability problem well before it becomes a water-use problem. Continuous measurement of both parameters, reported into the building management system, would give facilities teams one telemetry stream where many rely on periodic sampling. Whether that holds up at Omen's target scale will depend on how the integrated sensor performs once it leaves the lab and enters the field.
The broader context here is that liquid cooling has moved from specialty deployments into mainstream AI infrastructure. The fluid in those loops now needs the same careful measurement as power and temperature, and operators who instrument it well may gain an advantage in uptime and water stewardship. For the next year, the deal's significance rests less on the purchase price than on whether the promised integrated sensor reaches customers on the stated schedule.
