Overview of LBNL's Industry Engagement
LBNL leverages its deep scientific expertise and long-standing history of supporting DOE’s mission to drive industrial collaboration. From advanced testing and validation to strategic partnerships, the Lab accelerates the development and deployment of transformative technologies, helping industry partners address critical challenges while advancing domestic industrial competitiveness.
LBNL drives industrial innovation through initiatives and partnerships like DC Cool and REFLEX, which bridge the gap between cutting-edge research and real-world application. Together, these partnerships with key industry stakeholders help us tackle urgent data center challenges while advancing national energy affordability and reliability.
DC Cool
The Data Center Cooling Collaborative (DC Cool) is a coordinated testbed network led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for accelerating the development, testing, and adoption of advanced cooling solutions for data centers. DC Cool aims to commercialize novel data center cooling solutions by providing flexible and standardized user test facilities and reducing time and cost required to bring new cooling technologies. DC Cool and the Open Compute Project (OCP) have established a "Cooling Technologies Testing Workstream" to enable sustained industry communication and engagement to create objective, open testing guidelines and enable the comparison of cooling technologies. ‘Cooling Technologies Testing Workstream’ within OCP includes a broad range of collaborators, including hyperscalers, equipment manufacturers, and infrastructure firms such as Meta, Google, NVIDIA, bp Castrol, Hitachi, and SuperMicro among others.
REFLEX
REFLEX is a U.S. Department of Energy funded initiative led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) with the mission of establishing an enduring national capability to move industrial load flexibility from manual and reactive to automated and predictive.
With data centers driving significant growth in U.S. energy demand over the next five years, REFLEX will develop and deploy deep scientific expertise for flexible, automated management of data center energy use. LBNL will lead field demonstrations for flexible load management within data centers and develop data center specific recommendations for technology & communications packages, utility rates & program support, and tool/resource development to accelerate large load interconnection, increase grid reliability, and reduce generation costs with load flexibility. The Program Stakeholder Advisory Group for REFLEX consists of utilities, hyperscalers, technology developers, aggregators, and state planning bodies.
Our researchers facilitate collaborative industry engagements through targeted workshops and training sessions that bring together a diverse range of stakeholders—including data center operators, utilities, researchers, and policymakers. These forums are designed to solicit vital industry feedback, address complex technical and regulatory barriers, and align federal research visions with real-world operational challenges.
Open Compute Project (OCP)
LBNL hosted an industry listening session along with industry partner bp Castrol titled “Federal Energy Research at the Nexus of High-Density, Large-Scale Compute and the Grid," on October 15, 2025, at the OCP Global Summit. The primary goal of the workshop was to solicit direct industry input to help shape the U.S. Department of Energy and LBNL’s federal data center energy research vision. The discussion focused on gathering industry feedback on the most challenging technical obstacles in powering and cooling high-density compute load. The session also solicited inputs on industry-wide trends and practices in IT equipment selection across various data center types and workloads for calibrating industry-wide models of U.S. data center energy use and updating the U.S. Data Center Energy Usage Report to Congress. The workshop was attended by ~150 industry participants.
DOE Data Center Load Flexibility Workshop
On November 1, 2024, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory hosted an interactive workshop on behalf of the Department of Energy (DOE). The event brought together 49 participants, including data center owners, operators, and developers, representatives from electric utilities and regulators, industry stakeholders, and researchers. The primary objective was to address the growing demand for data center services—largely driven by artificial intelligence (AI)—and the resulting strain on the electricity grid. Discussions focused on integrating demand flexibility into data center operations while identifying technical, financial, and regulatory barriers to large-scale implementation and potential solutions to address these challenges.