In this episode, Sunny Ray talks with Jonathan Nimon, founder of Sustana Cooling Partners, a venture fund focused on the cooling and cold tech stack that keeps chips, food, buildings and logistics running. Nimon explains why exploding heat demand from AI, 5G and robotics is forcing data centers to shift from air cooling to liquid and hydronic systems, making cooling technology critical to grid resilience. He connects this thesis to a broader macro view on protecting purchasing power through real assets like energy and Bitcoin as fiat currencies weaken. Nimon traces his path from Capitol Hill energy policy work and an MIT molecular biology degree through stints at ABB, UBS, Storebrand and SunEdison, and reveals the underappreciated story behind his early, high conviction investment in Tesla at sixteen dollars a share, sold in tranches for five times and ten times returns. He argues Tesla's real edge was thermal management of batteries, the same core problem now scaling to entire data centers and cities, which convinced him cooling will be a larger opportunity than solar, batteries or Tesla itself.
The investor who bought Tesla at $16 explains why cooling tech, not EVs or solar, is the next trillion dollar opportunity.
Can you explain what Sustana Cooling Partners is?
Sustana Cooling Partners is the first global venture fund focused on cooling and the whole cold tech stack, the technology and processes used to cool chips, keep food cool, run healthcare logistics, and keep buildings comfortable. That stack is vital to grid resilience as heat demand explodes. We help investors get exposure to the small companies leading this technology wave, companies that will eventually be acquired by global infrastructure firms or private equity, similar to how solar or renewables funds work but focused entirely on cooling.
Why does cooling matter so much right now?
The why is simple: we have exploding cooling demand from AI, 5G and robotics. A data center built for fifty kilowatt chips using air cooling cannot handle thousand kilowatt Nvidia chips with the same architecture. You need liquids, plumbing, hydronics, an entirely different tech stack. This isn't growing one percent a year, it's an explosion, and managing that heat is critical for the grid, tech companies, real estate and food industries alike.
You mentioned Bitcoin and electricity before we went live. Can you expand on that?
Investors have long protected wealth from weak currencies by buying gold, and Bitcoin is sometimes called digital gold for the same reason. Electricity prices tend to rise steadily, unlike volatile commodities like natural gas or metals. Investing in cooling tech is really investing in future kilowatt hours, since better cooling technology means more efficient use of electricity that's only going up due to robotics, data centers, 5G and Bitcoin mining itself.
Where did you grow up and what were you curious about as a kid?
I grew up in the shadow of Washington DC and had a fairly well rounded, if odd, public policy oriented childhood, doing math team, tennis, working as a congressional page and intern. I later worked for a park and planning commission computerizing their systems. I studied statistics and political theory at Columbia, then worked for Congress on the energy committee during the Arab oil embargo era, which sparked my long interest in energy systems.
What did you see in Tesla at $16 that the rest of the market wasn't pricing in?
People were pricing up design, but Tesla was making its own batteries and its own thermal management systems, going deep into the weeds compared to companies like Fisker. The stock was below its IPO price and people thought it was going away, but I believed a dedicated base of EV enthusiasts, especially in California, would keep it alive. It was a conviction buy even though the technicals were negative at the time.
What made you realize cooling, not solar or batteries, would be the next trillion dollar industry?
I was brought into a project to build a 200 megawatt self powered data center and found that cooling was 40 percent of the load, and using waste heat for absorption chilling made it both the greenest and most profitable option. That, combined with later seeing entrepreneurs solve cooling problems in food quality and real estate using approaches like graphene, showed me this was bigger than any single sector like data centers alone.
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