Dive Brief:
- Modine’s Airedale brand has launched a cooling distribution unit to meet the growing demand for high-performance, high-efficiency data center cooling systems.
- The CDU delivers up to 1 megawatt of cooling capacity and can operate at supply temperatures of up to 86 degrees Fahrenheit in a secondary water loop system and about 79 degrees Fahrenheit in a primary loop structure, the company said in a Sept. 17 news release.
- While the market for traditional air-based cooling systems continues to grow, liquid cooling is emerging as a new growth area, and Modine expects many data center operators to adopt a hybrid cooling approach to handle higher-density IT loads, Modine Climate Solutions President Eric McGinnis said in a statement.
Dive Insight:
Earlier this year, Modine President and CEO Neil Brinker highlighted the company’s strategy to grow its presence in the global data center market. In January, it acquired assets from TMG Core, a company specializing in single- and dual-phase liquid immersion cooling technology for data centers with high-density computing requirements.
Modine’s data center sales rose 138% year over year in its first fiscal quarter of 2025, ending June 30, and it plans to add more capacity for its data center products. Much of that available capacity is slated to come online later in 2024, Brinker said during the company’s earnings call July 31.
The Airedale CDU expands Modine’s product offerings across the thermal chain, comprising air, liquid and hybrid cooling systems, per the company’s news release.
The CDU is a key component of any liquid cooling system, isolating facility water systems from the IT equipment and distributing coolant fluid to where it is required in the server or rack, Modine said. The new technology strengthens Modine’s position in a rapidly growing data center liquid cooling market, providing its hyperscale and colocation customers with “advanced solutions to support the next generation of high-density, accelerated computing applications, such as generative artificial intelligence and machine learning,” Brinker said in the release.
Server racks in data centers are seeing an increase in energy density, due in part to a growing adoption of AI and high-performance computing applications. As of 2023, 5% of data centers were reporting rack densities of 50 kilowatts or higher, according to a study LiquidStack, Chemours and Syska Hennessy Group released in March. That study projected that rack densities of over 100 kW will become the norm over time.
In August, LiquidStack announced it would make its high-performance CDU for direct-to-chip liquid cooling systems available worldwide.
Modine expects to deliver its Airedale CDU, tested earlier this year, to a colocation customer in Europe during the company’s fourth fiscal quarter and later ship it to key colocation customers in North America.
