André Sloth Eriksen

André Sloth Eriksen is founder and chief executive of Asetek, a company based near Aalborg, Denmark, that designs liquid cooling for PCs and data center servers and makes sim racing equipment. He came up with the idea for Asetek in 1997, while he was studying at Aalborg University.

Learning a Trade Before Engineering

Eriksen trained as a toolmaker and soon afterward studied to become an engineer, he told Flow Racers in 2023. He then joined the management trainee program at Danfoss, the Danish industrial group. "Then I got bored, and then I started Asetek, so that's basically what I've been doing for the last 25 years," he said.

Freezing CPUs With VapoChill

Asetek's first product, VapoChill, cooled processors below freezing so they could run faster. It was "very advanced, very expensive and very difficult," Eriksen said, but it put him in touch with the right people and showed him a market for liquid cooling "where the end users should not mess around with water themselves and cut the tubes and everything." Asetek put the pump, tubing and radiator into one sealed unit, and it has sold more than 10 million of those all-in-one coolers.

In 2007 its technology was chosen to cool HP's Blackbird 002 gaming PC, and machines from Acer and Dell-Alienware followed, according to Asetek's company history. Intel and AMD later brought Asetek-based CPU coolers to market, and Asetek listed its shares on the Oslo Stock Exchange in 2013.

Cooling Supercomputers and AI Servers

Asetek later took its direct-to-chip liquid cooling into data centers, and by November 2018 it was cooling 13 systems on the TOP500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers. In April 2026 Asetek was sold to CQXA Holdings, owned by the Chinese precision-components maker Chunqiu, after five suitors approached it. Eriksen told TV2 Nord, in Danish, that the company's cooling expertise drove the deal, because the servers in AI data centers are so powerful that they cannot run without water cooling, which is Asetek's business. He said Asetek would continue as a Danish company with the same staff and management, and that the buyers had made an effort to keep him on as chief executive.

Building Asetek SimSports

In 2021 Asetek expanded into sim racing hardware. The idea came from an esports academy Asetek set up around 2018 for young people who could not afford gaming PCs, Eriksen said. The five racing simulators it bought for the academy kept breaking, which pushed him to try to build better ones. A fan of architecture and hi-fi equipment, he favors a flat black look with ribs for the hardware, and his goal is realism. "I'm not trying to please sim racers, I'm trying to build a product that feels like a real race car," he said.

Personal Life

Eriksen raced motocross as a boy, paying for it with jobs as a newspaper boy and cleaning floors at a factory because his parents could not afford it. After moving to the United States in 2007 he took up karting, hired a former professional driver as a coach and won the Northern California series about a year later before moving on to formula cars. The family later returned to Denmark and built a house in Nibe, Denmark, near Aalborg, Mig og Aalborg reported. His son, Valdemar, races sports prototypes, and his daughter helps with the team, so the family spends many weekends a year at the track.