NLR reported a 110,000-square-foot Texas data center coated with IntelliKoat; its CEO said inside temperatures fell from 140°F to 86°F and heat failures dropped to zero

Data centers run hot, all day, every day. Servers operate round-the-clock, and any sudden rise in room temperature can bring operations to a halt. One Texas data center found a possible fix for this problem: paint. The startup, EnKoat, coated the roof of the 110,000 sq ft structure with a product called IntelliKoat. According to EnKoat cofounder Matthew Aguayo, the room temperature fell from 140°F to 86°F and heat-related equipment failures dropped to zero. That claim appears in an April 20, 2026 feature by the National Laboratory of the Rockies (NLR), the U.S. Department of Energy lab renamed from NREL in December 2025, which quoted the cofounder. The piece was primarily about a separate rooftop coating pilot at a New Jersey warehouse, where NLR's own sensors are measuring results directly; the Texas numbers are Aguayo's company-reported figures, cited as prior context rather than independently verified by NLR.

A coating that works like sunscreen

Matthew Aguayo, a materials scientist, structural engineer, and EnKoat's cofounder and CEO, put it simply: the company is "putting sunscreen on roofs." IntelliKoat is not just one coating; it’s two coatings, one on top of the other. One layer keeps the heat out of the building. The other protects the roof surface from UV rays, hail and wind. Before the coating was applied, Aguayo says, the Texas data center had had repeated equipment failures due to cooling problems. Post-installation, the facility operated at 100% uptime with zero heat-related breakdowns. This is consistent with other research on why cool roofs work in the first place. A study by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Heat Island Group shows that a roof that reflects 80% of the sunlight can be about 55°F cooler than a similar dark roof that reflects only 20%. Dark roofs absorb heat like a black car in the sun. Light, shiny surfaces reflect that heat away from the building and out into space.

Why cooling failures matter so much


Cooling failures present a huge challenge to the data center industry. According to the 2024 Global Data Center Survey conducted by the Uptime Institute, cooling failures were the second most common cause of large-scale outages in 2024, with only power issues being the first one. Just one overheating incident can shut down servers for hours and put applications running on them, including bank applications or hospital databases, at risk.

The stakes are only rising. According to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s 2024 United States Data Center Energy Usage Report, data centers consumed about 176 terawatt-hours of energy in 2023, equivalent to 4.4% of total energy consumption in the United States, driven mostly by the rising trend of AI computing. Much of this electricity is used for cooling rather than computation. A coating that reduces the heat inside without requiring more air conditioning could ease the strain on a data center’s equipment and its power bill.

From a university lab to real rooftops

EnKoat’s story didn’t start in a data center. Aguayo and co-founder Aashay Arora found the heat-blocking material while working at Arizona State University. To test their product’s effectiveness away from a laboratory setting, they enrolled in the National Science Foundation’s I-Corps and NLR’s Innovation Incubator (IN2). IN2 is a Wells Fargo initiative in collaboration with NLR that helps startups test their products in real buildings. NLR’s researchers did their own checks on EnKoat’s numbers and used supercomputer models to estimate what would happen if the coating were applied to thousands of US buildings.

The early testing had paid off. In January 2025, the NLR provided Galvanize, a real estate investment company, with $200,000 for IN2’s first Scalable Tech track to try to bring EnKoat’s coating from the laboratory into reality. The two companies selected a 60,000-square-foot warehouse in Pedricktown, N.J., for the test. In the fall of 2025, EnKoat applied its IntelliKoat coating in the selected location, while NLR scientists put sensors there to measure indoor temperature differences before and after the application of the coating under similar weather conditions. EnKoat has since coated a Houston-based office project, too, and is working with Arizona’s largest utility to explore whether the coating could help ease power demand during the state’s punishing summer heat.

The bigger picture for hot cities

This does not mean that a coat of paint can replace air conditioning in every case. However, for buildings that absorb heat all day, it can be quite useful to decrease the heat absorbed from the start and lower the strain on the cooling system. This can be useful in data centers, hospitals and warehouses where a heat-induced shutdown is expensive and sometimes dangerous. Reflective roofs are attracting more attention as cities around the world face hotter summers, because they’re cheap to test and easy to measure. While a roof coating alone won’t stop climate change, one Texas data center solved a 140-degree problem with an 86-degree non-issue and that’s the kind of real-world result that gets an industry’s attention.