Tag: Munters

  • AI Density Without a New Build: OData’s $630M Liquid Cooling Retrofit in Brazil, Mexico

    AI Density Without a New Build: OData’s $630M Liquid Cooling Retrofit in Brazil, Mexico

    TL;DR · 30-second read

    The Short Version

    The computer chips that run artificial intelligence get so hot that blowing cold air over them is no longer enough. The fix is to pipe liquid right up to the chip.

    OData, a data center operator active across Latin America, is spending 630 million dollars to add that liquid plumbing to two buildings it already runs, one in Brazil and one in Mexico. The work has started.

    Why it matters: the region can host the newest, hottest artificial intelligence machines by upgrading buildings that already exist, instead of waiting years for new ones to be built.

    Data Center Dynamics reported that OData is installing DeltaFlow, a proprietary liquid cooling system developed by its parent company Aligned Data Centers with the power and cooling vendor Munters, at its SP04 data center in Brazil and its QR03 facility in Mexico. The project is priced at $630 million across the two sites, and phase one installation and testing is already underway at both.

    Both facilities already run Aligned’s Delta Cubed air cooling system. DeltaFlow will let them operate as hybrid halls — air cooling for conventional servers, liquid cooling for the high-density racks that AI accelerators require. The DeltaFlow units are manufactured at Munters’ plant in Araucária, in the Brazilian state of Paraná.

    Executive Summary

    This is a retrofit, not a groundbreaking. OData is adding direct liquid cooling — coolant carried to a plate sitting on the processor itself, rather than chilled air pushed across a room — to two data centers that are already built, already powered and already in service. That distinction is the whole economic argument. Liquid cooling is what allows a rack to draw the tens of kilowatts that AI accelerators consume, and the fastest route to that capability is almost always a building that already exists.

    The $630 million figure is unusually large for a project described in terms of cooling, which suggests scope well beyond swapping chillers: retrofits of this type typically pull in electrical distribution, floor loading, piping, heat rejection and controls. The release does not break the number down, and it does not state how much liquid-cooled capacity the spend produces.

    The second thread is manufacturing. DeltaFlow is built at a Munters factory in Paraná, inside Brazil. Long-lead mechanical equipment has been one of the more stubborn schedule constraints in data center construction, and supplying a Brazilian deployment from a Brazilian plant removes ocean freight and customs from that path.

    The Retrofit Is the Point

    OData’s two target sites are not new. The release states that both already operate Aligned’s Delta Cubed air cooling, and that DeltaFlow will enable them to run as hybrid air-and-liquid facilities catering to high-density AI racks. In plain terms: the buildings were designed for servers that a stream of cold air could keep in range, and they are being upgraded for servers that it cannot. A modern AI accelerator rack concentrates heat in a volume where moving enough air becomes impractical and expensive long before it becomes impossible, which is why coolant is brought to the chip instead.

    What that changes operationally is the pacing item. A new data center is gated by land, permits, construction and — most painfully in the current cycle — a grid connection, the queue to get utility power delivered to the site. A retrofit inherits all of those. The gate becomes mechanical installation and commissioning inside a shell that already has power, floor, network and security in place. That is measured in a fit-out schedule rather than a development schedule, and it is the reason a hybrid upgrade can put dense capacity into a market faster than any greenfield project competing for the same customer.

    The people this reaches are buyers in Brazil and Mexico who want to train or serve AI models on machines physically located in the region — for latency, for data residency, or simply because capacity elsewhere is spoken for. The release confirms the capability is coming and that work has begun. It does not say how many megawatts of liquid-cooled capacity results, or what rack density in kilowatts the halls will support, so the size of that advantage cannot yet be measured from the outside.

    $630 Million Is a Building Number, Not a Chiller Number

    The figure is given for the project across both sites, without itemisation. It is worth being precise about what a cooling retrofit actually involves, because the headline number only makes sense at that scope. Introducing liquid cooling into a live air-cooled hall generally touches the electrical distribution feeding denser racks, the structural loading of the floor, the piping and manifolds that carry coolant, the heat rejection plant outside the building, the water or refrigerant management behind it, and the control systems that have to run two cooling regimes at once without either interfering with the other — all while the existing customers stay online.

    What is substantiated here is a capital commitment of a stated size, a named technology, two named facilities and work that has begun. What is not substantiated is the unit economics. Without a capacity figure, there is no cost per megawatt, and cost per megawatt is precisely the number that would tell a buyer or an investor whether upgrading beats building. That is a disclosure question for OData and Aligned, not a flaw in the underlying project.

    There is a strategic read in how the system is sourced. Aligned designed DeltaFlow itself, with Munters, rather than buying merchant coolant distribution units off a catalogue. For a group operating across several countries, a single in-house platform means common spares, common training and a repeatable commissioning process — real advantages when you are staffing facilities in four national markets. The trade-off is concentration: the platform’s roadmap, and the factory behind it, become a dependency.

    The Factory in Paraná Is Part of the Infrastructure Story

    DeltaFlow is manufactured at Munters’ plant in Araucária, Paraná, in southern Brazil. That detail does more work than it first appears to. Across the industry, the binding constraint on data center schedules has repeatedly been long-lead mechanical and electrical equipment rather than chips or capital. Supplying a Brazilian deployment from a Brazilian factory takes ocean freight, port handling and import clearance out of the critical path for at least one of the two sites.

    Mexico is still a cross-border shipment, so the benefit is not symmetrical. But the same production line and the same platform serve both, and Munters’ Keith Dunnavant framed the company’s global manufacturing footprint as what allows it to support Aligned and OData as they expand across Latin America. A manufacturing presence in-region also tends to bring service technicians and spare parts inventory with it, which matters more for liquid systems than air ones: a leak or a pump failure in a liquid loop is a faster-moving problem than a failed fan.

    Neither company has quantified the plant’s output or said whether any of it is reserved for this project, so the supply-chain advantage is directional rather than measured.

    What It Signals About Latin American Colocation

    OData was founded in 2015 by the Brazilian private equity firm Patria Investments and acquired by Aligned Data Centers in May 2023. It runs facilities in Chile, Colombia, Brazil and Mexico with more in development. This deployment is, in effect, technology transfer from a North American operator into a regional platform it now owns — the same pattern the company followed with Delta Cubed on the air side.

    OData chief executive Ricardo Alário described the goal as establishing DeltaFlow as the market benchmark for liquid cooling in the region. That is an ambition rather than a disclosed market position, and it should be read as one. What the announcement does establish is concrete and checkable: a stated sum, two identified sites, a named manufacturing source and construction in progress. What it does not establish is demand. No anchor customer, pre-lease or contracted capacity has been disclosed, and a retrofit can be built ahead of committed tenants as easily as behind them.

    For competing operators in the same two markets, the practical effect is that rack density moves onto the specification sheet. Once one regional provider can quote liquid-cooled halls, requests for proposals start asking every provider what they can support per rack — and the answer for an air-only site is a hard ceiling that no amount of floor space compensates for.

    Background

    OData was founded in 2015 by Patria Investments, a Brazilian private equity firm, and grew into one of the region’s larger colocation platforms — operators that lease space, power and cooling to companies that prefer not to run their own facilities. Aligned Data Centers, a US operator known for developing its own cooling technology rather than buying it, acquired OData in May 2023. OData now runs facilities in Chile, Colombia, Brazil and Mexico with further sites in development, and has been the route by which Aligned’s in-house systems reach Latin American markets: the same two data centers receiving DeltaFlow already run Aligned’s Delta Cubed air cooling.

    The wider context is the shift in what a data center has to physically accommodate. For two decades, racks drew a few kilowatts each and chilled air sufficed. AI accelerators have pushed rack power an order of magnitude higher, past the point where air can economically carry the heat away. That has made cooling — historically an engineering afterthought to power and space — a gating factor on whether a given building can host AI workloads at all, and it has turned retrofits of existing, already-powered facilities into one of the faster routes to new AI-capable capacity.

    Sources

    Source: OData to deploy Aligned’s DeltaFlow liquid cooling system at Brazil and Mexico data centers — reporting on the $630 million deployment of Aligned’s DeltaFlow liquid cooling at OData’s SP04 facility in Brazil and QR03 facility in Mexico, including comment from OData and Munters.

  • Munters Bets on Virginia to Shorten Data Center Cooling Lead Times

    Munters Bets on Virginia to Shorten Data Center Cooling Lead Times

    TL;DR · 30-second read

    The Short Version

    The machines that stop computer warehouses from overheating are hard to get right now. Munters, a Swedish company that makes that cooling equipment, has finished enlarging its factory in Daleville, Virginia.

    The site is now about the size of ten football fields and employs close to 600 people. It has started building chillers, the large refrigeration units that cool whole buildings. Until now those were shipped in from Italy.

    Why it matters: computers running artificial intelligence get very hot, and waiting for cooling gear is one reason new data centers open late.

    Munters said in a September 11 release distributed by PR Newswire that it has inaugurated an expanded campus for data center cooling in Daleville, Virginia, adding manufacturing, training and testing space. The site covers 565,000 square feet, employs close to 600 people, and is the largest of five dedicated manufacturing facilities inside the company’s Data Center Technologies business worldwide.

    The expansion lets Munters build every product in its data center cooling range at one address: air-side economizers, the patented SyCool Split, computer room air handling units, fan coil arrays, coolant distribution units, and now chillers, which were previously produced in Italy. The campus also houses the Munters Service Academy, new production test stands, and a chiller laboratory with an environmental chamber.

    Executive Summary

    The announcement is less about a building than about where a building sits. Munters has moved chiller assembly from Italy to a site a few hours’ drive from the densest concentration of data centers on earth, and it can now produce its entire cooling portfolio in one place rather than splitting production across continents.

    That matters because mechanical plant has become a gating item for artificial intelligence buildouts. A chiller is a large, heavy, custom-configured machine. Ocean freight, customs, currency swings and trans-Atlantic scheduling all sit between an order and a commissioned data hall, and none of them respond to urgency. Manufacturing on the same landmass as the customer removes weeks of that friction and makes change orders cheaper to absorb.

    The strategic logic is sound and the physical facts are specific. The performance claims attached to it are not. Munters describes its Circlemiser chiller as greatly reducing energy consumption and total required power versus typical air-cooled chillers, but publishes no percentage, baseline or test condition alongside that statement. Buyers should treat the factory as substantiated and the efficiency claim as a directional marketing position awaiting data.

    Geography Is the Product

    Daleville is in southwestern Virginia, near Roanoke and well outside the Northern Virginia cluster that hosts the world’s largest agglomeration of data centers. That distance is a feature. Land and labor are cheaper away from the cluster, while the finished equipment is still a domestic truck haul from the campuses that will consume it, rather than a port call.

    The freight economics of cooling equipment are unlike those of servers. A rack of compute is dense, valuable and air-freightable. A chiller is bulky, comparatively low in value per cubic meter, and moves by sea. Shifting Circlemiser production from Italy to Virginia therefore converts a multi-week international logistics chain into a domestic one, and removes a layer of tariff and currency exposure from the delivered price. For a developer whose revenue starts only when a hall is energized, schedule certainty on mechanical plant is worth real money.

    There is a second, quieter advantage. Cooling systems for large campuses are rarely catalog items. When engineering, manufacturing, testing and service training sit on one site, a design change can be resolved in a corridor conversation rather than across a seven-hour time difference. That compression of the iteration loop is the part of co-location that does not show up in a square-footage figure.

    One Roof, Air Through Liquid

    The portfolio list in the announcement is worth unpacking, because it maps the whole transition the industry is living through. Air-side economizers pull in outside air when it is cool enough, letting a facility idle its compressors and save power. Computer room air handling units, known as CRAHs, push chilled air through the room. Fan coil arrays do similar work closer to the equipment. These are the tools of the air-cooled era, and they still cool the overwhelming majority of installed capacity.

    Coolant distribution units, or CDUs, belong to the next era. They are the pump-and-heat-exchanger boxes that push liquid coolant directly to chips, which is how the densest artificial intelligence racks shed heat that air can no longer carry away fast enough. Chillers sit underneath both approaches, producing the chilled water that feeds air handlers and liquid loops alike.

    Building all of it in one factory is a hedge against an uncertain mix. No one knows precisely how quickly liquid cooling will displace air, or what share of a given campus will be hybrid. A manufacturer that can flex between the two without retooling a second site carries less risk than one that has bet a plant on a single architecture. The commercial question is whether that flexibility comes with the throughput a hyperscale order actually requires, and the announcement does not quantify capacity.

    Demand Is Evidently Not the Constraint

    Munters has told investors that order intake in the April-to-June quarter rose 137 percent, driven by strong demand in Data Center Technologies and its AirTech business, and separately announced an order worth roughly 2.0 billion Swedish kronor from a United States colocation provider for a modular artificial intelligence cooling solution. Capacity expansions generally follow backlog, and a backlog of that shape explains this one.

    The same quarterly communication was headlined around exceptional demand alongside external headwinds currently affecting profitability, which is the more instructive half of the picture. Order growth of that magnitude is expensive to serve. Ramping a new production line, qualifying a chiller laboratory, staffing test stands and training a service organization all consume cash before the first unit ships. Investors should expect the Daleville expansion to weigh on margins before it helps them, and should watch conversion of backlog into delivered revenue rather than intake alone.

    There is also a customer-concentration question embedded in any business growing this way. Large colocation and hyperscale orders are lumpy. A vendor that builds capacity against a small number of very large commitments is exposed if one of those programs slips, and artificial intelligence buildout schedules have proven willing to slip.

    The Scarce Input Is Trained People

    The presence of the Munters Service Academy on the expanded campus is a more revealing detail than the square footage. Frank Pellegrino, the incoming president of the business area, framed manufacturing setup as only part of the equation and pointed to skilled people, technical knowledge and service capability. That is an accurate description of where the sector’s real bottleneck has migrated.

    Liquid cooling changes the skills required in a data hall. Pumped coolant, quick-disconnect fittings and leak detection are not the same discipline as ducted air, and the installed base of technicians trained on the older approach is much larger than the base trained on the newer one. A vendor that trains its own service workforce, and its customers’ staff, controls a resource that cannot be bought with capital on a short timeline.

    For Botetourt County, close to 600 jobs in precision mechanical manufacturing is a meaningful anchor, and it places industrial employment in a part of Virginia that has not captured much of the data center boom’s direct benefit. Whether the expansion adds materially to that headcount is not stated. The figure given is the current workforce, not a hiring target.

    Background

    Munters is a Swedish climate-technology company, headquartered in Stockholm and publicly listed, that builds equipment for controlling temperature and humidity across industries. Its Data Center Technologies unit has grown into one of the sector’s more prominent specialist cooling suppliers as computing density has risen, and it operates five dedicated manufacturing facilities for that business globally. Daleville is the largest of them.

    Virginia has been the center of gravity for American data center development for more than two decades, with Northern Virginia hosting the largest concentration of capacity in the world. The artificial intelligence buildout has strained the supply chain that serves it. Chips draw attention, but the unglamorous mechanical inputs, chillers, air handlers, switchgear and transformers, have become the practical limit on how quickly capacity comes online. Placing manufacturing close to that demand is a response to the problem rather than a solution to it, and several equipment vendors have moved in the same direction.

    Sources

    Source: Munters completes expansion of data center cooling campus in Daleville, Virginia — the company’s September 11, 2026 announcement detailing the expanded campus, its product lines and the start of local chiller production.