Asetek was founded by André Eriksen in 1997. The company's initial focus was the VapoChill line of phase-change coolers. Within its first year of operation, Asetek established a network of more than 35 VapoChill resellers. In 2000, the company was officially incorporated and received an award from the Danish Ministry of Trade and Industry as Denmark's most innovative company of the year. Expanding its technical reach, Asetek released the first 2-GHz personal computer in 2001 and established a business partnership with Asus.
In 2002, Asetek released a new generation of VapoChill, though it soon faced primary competition from Chip-Con/nVENTIV’s Prometeia line. The company branched out into liquid cooling in 2003 with its WaterChill brand and released the first 12-volt pump system in 2005.
Asetek transitioned into a major OEM provider in the late 2000s. In 2007, it announced its first OEM design for HP’s Blackbird Gaming PC. This was followed by a partnership with Acer in 2008 for the Predator Gaming PC line. By 2009, Dell had made Asetek liquid cooling a standard feature on its Alienware computers.
Released in 2010, the Gen 3 pump featured a reduced size compared to Gen 2 without compromising performance. The lower profile was designed to facilitate GPU cooling, such as for the PNY Technologies GTX 580. These pumps, used by Corsair, PNY, and Antec, are identifiable by an exposed motor portion on the cap.
The Gen 4 platform, released in 2012, improved liquid flow and thermal performance. It removed the exposed motor section found in Gen 3. This became the most-used platform in Asetek's history, utilized by companies including Corsair, NZXT, Thermaltake, Dell, HP, and Intel.
Released in 2015, Gen 5 introduced a more efficient motor and optimized chambers to reduce noise and increase thermal performance. This generation replaced the side-mounted inlets and outlets of previous designs with vertical configurations.
Revealed at Computex in 2017 and released in 2018, Gen 6 returned to side-mounted inlets and outlets. It featured the first change to the cold-plate design in several years, making it smaller. Initial adopters included Corsair (for the H150i and H115i), Asus, and Gigabyte.
Asetek designs and manufactures OEM liquid cooling pumps for both desktop and data center environments. These solutions are primarily used to cool central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs).
Asetek is known for its extensive patent portfolio and its practice of pursuing litigation. The company holds patents for various liquid cooling systems and pumps, most notably the design that places the pump within the water block (the component seated over the CPU or GPU). Because many other manufacturers have released all-in-one (AIO) liquid coolers using this design, Asetek has taken numerous companies to court. It has successfully sued Cooler Master, Corsair, and CoolIT Systems on these grounds.
However, the company has also faced legal setbacks. On October 12, 2020, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTAB) rejected Asetek’s challenge against the CoolIT Systems ‘200 patent. The PTAB ruled that all 21 claims of the CoolIT patent were valid and survived without amendment.