Dive Brief:

• Nordik Data Centers and data center cooling specialist Accelsius have formed a strategic partnership to build a state-of-the-art data center near Montreal featuring a “co-innovation lab” to test Accelsius’ two-phase, direct-to-chip cooling technology under real-world conditions, the companies have announced.
• The co-innovation lab, slated to open in the second quarter of 2025, “is designed to support the most advanced compute workloads and densest compute pods on the market,” the companies said.
• Coupled with a cold-climate location that offers significant “free cooling” potential and a facility designed around cutting-edge AI chips, Accelsius’s two-phase cooling technology should enable “exceptionally low [power usage effectiveness],” while allowing the chips to operate closer to their performance limits, Accelsius CEO Josh Claman said in an email.

Dive Insight:

Nordik Data Centers chose Accelsius’s direct-to-chip liquid cooling solution to eliminate the risk of water-based cooling system leaks to customers’ server racks, which can cost more than $1 million each, the companies said. 

The partnership is a “pivotal moment” for Accelsius as it enters the Canadian market, Claman said in a statement.

The co-innovation lab at Nordik DC1 is the first of what could become a six-building campus outside of Shawinigan, Quebec. The lab will allow prospective customers, ecosystem partners and industry stakeholders to compare Accelsius’s NeuCool cooling technology against traditional cooling systems in a comprehensive testing, measurement and benchmarking environment “designed to push the limits of AI infrastructure,” the companies said. 

Industry-wide, the average data center power usage effectiveness, or PUE, is about 1.8, while efficiency-focused data centers typically come in around 1.2, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. The highly efficient data center at NREL’s Energy Systems Integration Facility has an annualized PUE of 1.036, the laboratory says. PUE is the ratio of total power consumed to the amount of power delivered to computing units. 

Nordik and Accelsius will collect data and validate performance at Nordik DC1 over the next few months and “look forward to sharing detailed results as they become available,” Claman told Facilities Dive.

Nordik DC1 is a 46,000 square-foot, five-megawatt data center that meets the UpTime Institute’s “concurrently maintainable” Tier III standard, the company says. Tier III data centers must have redundant electrical, HVAC and data systems that allow them to run through equipment maintenance or replacement cycles.

Accelsius’ NeuCool system delivers up to 50% energy savings relative to air cooling, and Quebec’s cold climate offers “high potential for free cooling,” Claman said. Accelsius expects to significantly outperform the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers’ requirement that the facility prepare for 70% free cooling and 30% mechanical cooling, he added.

The facility will test additional efficiency measures, including higher water loop temperatures and optimized heat rejection methods, the companies said. 

Higher temperatures in the secondary water loop that collects and rejects heat from the direct-to-chip cooling fluid is especially important for efficiency, Claman said. 

“Being able to run with higher water temperatures in the facility loop while still maintaining effective cooling … means you need less energy to cool the chips,” he said.

Accelsius and Nordik are exploring multiple potential applications for heat recovered from DC1’s computing units, including building heating, domestic water heating and agricultural uses, Claman added.

The Nordik-Accelsius partnership will enable “a step change in sustainability that our industry desperately needs,” Nordik Data Centers CEO Jean-Michel Picard said in a statement.

Quebec’s cool climate, political stability and abundant hydropower — Nordik DC1 will run on “100% green energy,” according to Nordik — could make it a major North American data center hub in the future, “and our commercial strategy is built around this vision,” Claman said.