ChipVat
San Francisco, CA
Sealed supercritical computing
Patent pending
A computing machine, not a cooling accessory

A computer that pressurises itself with its own waste heat.

Seal a rigid vessel, fill it with carbon dioxide above its critical density, and put the processors inside. The heat they make raises the pressure. The pressure drives the circulation. There is no pump, no compressor, and no refrigeration plant anywhere in the machine — the only moving thing is the fluid, and what moves it is the computation itself.

6.89W/cm²
buoyancy can carry
139bar
at 35 °C, self-pressurised
954W
per GPU module
12
neighbours per module
0pumps
no compressor, no chiller

Every figure on this page is computed from the Span–Wagner equation of state for CO₂, or from closed-form geometry. Nothing here is illustrative.

The shape of the machine follows from a packing problem.

If modules must touch as many neighbours as possible and still tile space with no gaps, the mathematics leaves you very little choice.

The module

A rhombic dodecahedron

Twelve faces, twelve neighbours — the kissing number in three dimensions, and therefore the most any equal body can touch. It is the Voronoi cell of the face-centred cubic lattice, so identical modules stack with no wasted volume.

The liner

The same solid, larger

A hollow shell of the same shape holds the modules on its interior facets. Because liner and module are the same solid at two scales, every facet lies parallel to a module face — and seating only works at particular sizes, never in between.

The interconnect

One substrate, no network

Those facets carry the wiring. An assembly that would normally be many boards joined by a network sits on a single surface instead, so no signal crosses a network hop to reach another module.

There are exactly five convex solids that can do this — the parallelohedra Fedorov enumerated in 1885. The rhombic dodecahedron is the only one offering twelve neighbours and a single facet shape.

The charge density is the only dial.

In a sealed rigid vessel you cannot choose pressure and temperature separately — they are tied together by the equation of state. Fix how much CO₂ goes in, and everything else about the machine is already decided.

Charge
800 kg/m³ — above the critical density, deliberately
Pressure
139 bar at 35 °C, rising about 4.9 bar per °C — 500 bar at 107 °C, 800 bar at 167 °C
Why above
It puts the specific-heat peak inside the boundary layer, where the heat actually crosses — not out in the bulk where it does nothing
Flux
Up to 6.89 W/cm² by buoyancy alone — a full machine asks for about 1.9
Shell
Copper-chromium-zirconium, rated up to 800 bar — the wall runs from 36 to 268 mm with size and rating; — 320 W/m·K, twenty times the conductivity of steel

The whole machine, solved live in your browser.

Not a rendering. Change the bore, the pressure rating, the charge density or the junction limit, and the pack re-solves: module count, capacity, flux, wall thickness, network diameter. Peel the vessel inner to outer, or open a single module and look at the dies from inside.

We also build vats around hardware you already own.

Separate from the machine above. Send us your cards and power supplies; we bench-test everything, measure your actual stack, and fabricate a sealed vat engineered around it. Nothing is due up front — the invoice comes thirty days after your build ships, and hardware that fails validation goes home with no order written.