Hewlett-Packard, Yahoo, IBM, and Alcatel-Lucent got grants from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) for projects on improving energy efficiency in the IT and communicatio technology industries.

Yahoo got $9.9 million to design a data center that uses outside ambient air cooling.

Hewlett-Packard got $7.4 million for testing a data center design using alternative current and water cooling components.

Alcatel-Lucent got $1.8 million to test heat-sink structures and device-level liquid cooling technologies and another $300,000 to test methods to synchronize telecom network energy demand.

IBM got two grants totalling $4 million to develop liquid metal thermal interfaces for data centers and to develop software based cooling tools.