SC26 Welcomes First-time Exhibitors to Chicago

Jerric Ortiz, senior product manager with AMCO Enclosures, represents a company with deep roots in engineered infrastructure. If you are not familiar with AMCO Enclosures, it is a brand of IMS Engineered Products, a Des Plaines, Illinois-based manufacturer with more than 70 years of experience designing and producing high-quality server racks, cabinets, and electronic enclosures.

According to Ortiz, “We chose to participate in SC26 because it’s the ideal platform to showcase more than 80 years of engineering military-strength racks and over 30 years of designing enclosures for the world’s most demanding compute facilities.”

For AMCO, SC26 is both a visibility play and a growth opportunity, an environment where proven engineering meets a highly targeted audience. “We have 30 years of proven performance in compute-facility enclosures,” continued Ortiz.

We’re looking to elevate our brand as a trusted, engineering-driven partner in mission-critical infrastructure, and build relationships that convert into long-term business.

Anyone who has attended SC knows that SCinet is the conference’s technological heartbeat – an extraordinary, large-scale network connecting hundreds of exhibitors and thousands of participants with performance levels rivaling the world’s most advanced environments.

For first-time exhibitor Crosstown Fiber, that environment represents both a challenge and an opportunity.

“SC26 represents one of the most demanding network environments in the world, where performance, scale, and reliability are critical,” said Michael Underdown, CEO of Crosstown Fiber. “We are the sole provider of critical underground fiber infrastructure for SC26 supporting 100% of SCinet’s external networking workloads from McCormick Place to Global Research and Education networks. Our high-capacity, low-latency fiber enables large-scale data movement required for HPC. We also deploy quantum communications–ready infrastructure, including to the Illinois Quantum Microelectronics Park.

HPC represents a strategically important and growing segment of Crosstown Fiber’s business; SC26 demonstrates the increasing reliance of HPC environments on purpose-built fiber networks for scalable data movement.

First-time exhibitor Inficon is addressing a critical – and increasingly urgent – challenge in modern data centers: ensuring the integrity of liquid cooling systems.

As liquid cooling adoption accelerates across HPC environments, so does the need for precision leak detection and system validation.

According to Tyler Loughran, a Key Account Manager with Inficon, “The liquid cooling industry is just starting to realize what it means to be truly liquid tight, and I want to help the industry ensure their systems are leak free. I ensure customers facilities across the country are leak tight. We are a dominant player in traditional HVACR [Heating, Ventilation, Air Conditioning, and Refrigeration] and Automotive but a relatively new player in the data center space.

We hope to meet many potential customers to share collaborative discussions in our booth at SC26.

SC26 continues to reinforce its role as a truly global gathering with a growing number of first-time exhibitors joining from outside the United States. Among them is KONST, a Taiwan-based company delivering end-to-end artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure solutions, including GPU bare metal, AI cloud platforms, and data center deployment.

According to CEO Avery Tsai, “We enable enterprises and research teams to efficiently build, train, and deploy AI workloads with high-performance compute, flexible scaling, and global infrastructure support. Our platform bridges hardware and AI applications, accelerating time-to-market while optimizing cost and performance.”

With approximately 70 percent of its business already rooted in HPC, KONST views SC26 as a strategic inflection point. “Our goal for SC26 is to build strong relationships with HPC researchers, enterprise buyers, and ecosystem partners, while elevating global awareness of KONST’s AI infrastructure capabilities,” continued Tsai. “We aim to generate high-quality leads, explore collaborations in large-scale AI training environments, and deepen our understanding of emerging HPC and AI trends. Ultimately, we view SC26 as a pivotal milestone in expanding KONST’s footprint in the global HPC and AI infrastructure market.

SC26 is one of the most influential global platforms for high-performance computing and AI infrastructure. As demand for large-scale AI training and inference accelerates, we see SC as a critical venue to engage with HPC leaders, researchers, and enterprise users.

Quantum computing continues to move from theoretical promise toward practical exploration, and its growing presence at SC26 reflects that shift. This year, 59 exhibitors reference “quantum” technologies among their offerings – a rise since SC22 where only seven exhibitors featured quantum among their product offerings, signaling growing momentum across the ecosystem.

Among them is Chicago-based first-time exhibitor MemQ, whose portfolio includes quantum network interface controllers, quantum memory modules, and quantum control systems.

“Quantum computing is the next major horizon for HPC, allowing us to address challenges and problems that have been unsolvable even for the Top 100 computer systems in the world. And it’s the SC audience that has to figure out how to embrace, deploy, and exploit these new technologies to do just that,” said Charles Foley, MemQ Chairman and CEO.

“MemQ enables scale-out quantum compute configurations that bring the scale and modularity needed to reach faster commercialization and broader utility. Our portfolio enables quantum computers of different qubit types to join native quantum networks. Our quantum network interface controllers allow quantum memory modules for distributed entanglement operations at scale, and our quantum control systems orchestrate qubit and distributed entanglement operations at scale with precision atomic timing.

We look forward to engaging and interacting with leading HPC practitioners and professionals to not only further the understanding of quantum networking in the HPC equation, but to solicit valuable input and insight into commercial deployment needs so we can focus our R&D into areas that will pay the biggest dividends for this audience.

Quantum computing continues to move from theoretical promise toward practical exploration, and its growing presence at SC26 reflects that shift. This year, 59 exhibitors The Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), a nonprofit R&D organization founded in 1947, brings decades of scientific and engineering expertise to the evolving challenges of HPC infrastructure. Their work in data center cooling, including validation, advanced liquid cooling approaches, and sustainability optimization, aligns closely with emerging needs across the industry.

“Currently about 25 percent of our business comes from the HPC market segment, but we anticipate this percentage will grow in the coming years,” said Ashok Thuyagarajan, a Research Engineer with SwRI. “SC26 is the premier HPC event, bringing together an exceptional community of researchers, engineers, and industry leaders. I’m motivated to learn from these experts, explore cutting-edge advancements, and build meaningful collaborations that accelerate innovation and real-world impact in high-performance computing. “quantum” technologies among their offerings – a rise since SC22 where only seven exhibitors featured quantum among their product offerings, signaling growing momentum across the ecosystem.

We hope to identify emerging data center cooling technologies, along with benchmarking best practices, forming strategic R&D partnerships, and gaining insights into HPC infrastructure needs to guide our innovation roadmap.

Welcome Aboard!

SC26 extends a warm welcome to all first-time exhibitors. The Conference is excited to have you aboard this year and look forward to these first timers becoming long-standing members of the SC Community in the years ahead.