End-to-end cooling for the next phase of industry growth

How do you view the data centre market at the moment?

When you look at the data centre market today, it’s one of the most dynamic areas of growth across the global economy. No generation in human history has experienced an infrastructure buildout of this speed and scale. There has been some discussion around how sustainable that pace is, but from what we’re seeing, the underlying demand drivers, especially AI, are real and continuing to build.

In many ways, the growth of AI still feels underappreciated in the near term. What’s happening right now is not just incremental expansion; it’s driving a real shift in the scale, density and performance requirements of data centre infrastructure.

As these environments grow more energy-intensive, supply becomes more constrained and costs rise, efficiency is fundamental to cost management, scalability and sustainability outcomes.

That’s where Johnson Controls comes in. With 140 years of expertise in complex heat transfer applications and some of the industry’s most advanced thermal management solutions, our work has never been more relevant and important.

What are the main trends and challenges with cooling at the moment?

The rise in physical AI and inference is creating many power constraints and cooling issues in the market amid complex data centre builds, meaning it’s the ideal time for us to help customers in the sector deal with these challenges, improve their sustainability and accelerate their time to value.

Cooling accounts for 30 to 40% of a data centre’s energy use. That makes energy- and water-efficient cooling among the industry’s most urgent challenges, and opportunities, that exist today. Every percentage point of non-IT energy saved can be reinvested in compute, while easing pressure on the grid.

We’re also seeing a massive amount of innovation and experimentation in the market, with different thermal architectures based on data-centre type and global location. Success lies in being able to address customer challenges with a portfolio that can support multiple approaches and having the engineering capability to integrate those systems into a reliable, high-performing environment, regardless of geographic location.

Cooling is becoming an important part of how data centres integrate into local communities too. There is increasing focus on minimising noise and designing systems that meet strict sound-level requirements, particularly as facilities move closer to residential areas. This is driving demand for quieter equipment, acoustic attenuation and design choices that avoid the need for retrofits later.

Why do you think Johnson Controls is particularly well set up to deal with these issues in data centres?

Johnson Controls brings something unique to this market: deep thermal expertise, systems integration capability, a 50,000-person field workforce and the scale to deliver globally.

We’ve spent 140 years building and operating critical environments across industries – from data centres to pharmaceuticals, advanced manufacturing and more. At the core of this is our JADEC R&D centre in Pennsylvania –the largest and most advanced of its kind – where we test and validate next-generation thermal solutions together with our customers.

Today, we’re experts in thermal and control systems, allowing operators to dynamically optimise performance, efficiency and resilience in real time. We’ve made strategic decisions over an extended period to focus not just on assembling technology, but owning the critical elements of that technology – giving us more control over performance, innovation and the ability to deliver to the most exacting performance standards.

We’ve cared deeply about decarbonisation and sustainability for a long time, and have a lot of technology deployed in other industries and applications that we’re bringing to the data centre space to improve efficiency.

One example is absorption chillers that capture waste heat from on-site power generation sources and convert it into cooling capacity. With this approach, chiller electricity use can be cut by up to 90%, reducing total plant energy by more than 45% and improving PUE [power-usage effectiveness] by 10%.

The next phase of data centre growth will be defined by how efficiently waste heat is utilised, and we’re seeing increasing customer interest in absorption technology.

How has the firm expanded its cooling capabilities through acquisitions?

We’ve been strategic in this space, building our portfolio with key technologies not just for today, but to be ready for the future. We acquired Silent-Aire, a global hyperscale data centre cooling and modular infrastructure player, back in 2021 before the explosion of AI, meaning it was far below some of the valuations you see in the market these days.

Since then, we’ve stayed really close to the industry and made strategic investments to enhance our thermal management portfolio from chip to chiller. We’ve just, for instance, completed the acquisition of Alloy Enterprises, a Boston-based company specialising in a next-generation thermal management platform for high-performance data centres and mission-critical applications.

Alloy’s platform has advanced direct-liquid-cooling components that can enable an up to 35% improvement in thermal management efficiency. It’s not just a product, but a technology capability that helps us optimise our potential in line with our market strategy.

Ultimately, this has helped us complete our ‘thermal chain’ and improve our ability to offer end-to-end cooling capabilities to customers. We have more than 15 product types that span this chain and that we’re focusing on optimising, helping to improve power- and water-usage effectiveness.

I understand that Johnson Controls is also investing to aid the development of capabilities in liquid cooling. Can you explain a bit about this?

Last year, we announced a strategic investment in Accelsius, which focuses on two-phase direct-to-chip liquid cooling – viewed as one of the next big phases in cooling technology.

This differs from current single-phase liquid cooling by boiling the fluid into a vapour before condensing again, rather than staying in the liquid form. That gives it massive heat-transfer efficiency, providing advantages at extremely high temperatures.

Heat densities in data centres don’t yet require this technology, but as I say, we want to be fully ready for all eventualities in the future, which is why we’ve made acquisitions and investments to enhance our cooling portfolio.

This is not to say that the whole market will involve two-phase or liquid cooling in general, or that air cooling will go away any time soon. Today, we have a variety of different types of data centres that require different methods, including cloud, inference, training and edge facilities. We want to cater to all of them.

What else is the company doing to boost its capabilities in cooling and data centres?

We’re also doing a ton of organic development, and we have some of the world’s leading research and development centres at the heart of this. We have, for instance, been developing our coolant distribution units and our chiller technologies, but also our capabilities in modular data centres.

Modular facilities can help operators bring revenue-generating capacity online quickly by enabling deployment in months rather than years – including the integration of cooling systems. This is particularly the case if a customer needs to get a site up and running quickly, or install one in a remote or complex environment.

Prefabricating these modules in a factory before sending them to the site reduces complexity, essentially giving customers a pre-kitted, pre-tested data centre that allows easy installation of equipment and expands the reach and impact of skilled labour. Multiple modules can also be combined on a site to increase the number of megawatts of compute.

How do you see Johnson Controls continuing to remove complexity and add reach for customers in the long term?

We are a trusted partner with long-term expertise and proven technologies. We can also provide end-to-end capabilities and expand them around the world relatively quickly, given our global team of 90,000 experts in more than 150 countries. With this footprint, we have good knowledge of areas like district heating and cooling, working closely with local stakeholders to understand and solve the unique challenges our customers face in different countries.

To help educate and support the industry, this year we’ve also started launching a series of reference designs for gigawatt-scale AI data centres, publishing them so far for water-cooled and air-cooled chillers, with one for absorption chillers coming soon. In doing this, we want to share our experience in how these systems can be integrated into data centres, while demonstrating our technology capabilities to potential customers.

Ultimately, we in the industry need to work together more tightly over time as AI data centres develop. Issues in this sector are some of the biggest we have to solve on this planet, thus requiring collaboration from every person and organisation in the ecosystem.

Partner content: Johnson Controls