We’re excited to share that Mater-AI has been awarded £150,000 through Innovate UK’s AI Champions: Frontier AI Phase 1 programme to advance our physics-informed AI Engine for Thermoelectrics.

Globally, around 70% of energy generated is lost as waste heat, creating a $152bn annual waste heat recovery opportunity. In data centres, the challenge is especially urgent: modern AI hardware generates intense, localised heat, while cooling already accounts for a significant share of energy consumption. As AI infrastructure scales, better heat management is becoming critical.

Mater-AI is building an AI-driven discovery platform for next-generation thermoelectric materials that can both convert waste heat into electricity and provide targeted solid-state cooling. By combining generative AI, machine learning and physics simulations, our engine searches a materials space far too large for conventional research to explore manually.

This Innovate UK project will help us advance our engine's core AI architecture by integrating reinforcement learning into a closed, physics-driven active-learning loop, enabling the platform to identify better thermoelectric materials faster.

We’re grateful to Innovate UK for backing our mission to build the next generation of thermoelectric materials for more energy-efficient computing and industrial systems.