Daikin Applied Europe and CTS Group today announced a patented cooling concept jointly developed to support high energy efficiency in data centers. The solution is designed to address some of the sector’s most pressing cost, capacity and sustainability challenges.
Credit: Daikin Applied Europe
As artificial intelligence continues to drive unprecedented growth in data center capacity and power density, operators face increasing pressure to reduce both capital investment and operating costs while ensuring maximum reliability and scalability. Overall facility energy efficiency, commonly measured through Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), is central to that equation. PUE compares the total energy used by the data center with the energy delivered to IT equipment, with cooling representing one of the main contributors to non-IT energy consumption. Building on a collaboration that began in 2023, the new concept combines Daikin’s cooling technologies, controls and application expertise with CTS Group’s modular engineering, system integration and prefabrication capabilities.
Industry-Leading Energy Performance — and a Direct Financial Payoff
The Daikin–CTS Group cooling concept has been designed to support projected PUE values as low as 1.09 in Nordic climates, while remaining below 1.20 under the assessed Middle Eastern ambient conditions, enabling high-efficiency operation across a broad range of geographical locations.
The projected PUE levels depend on both climatic conditions and the proportion of the IT load served by liquid cooling, as well as the specific system configuration and operating conditions. This performance is enabled by maximising the use of free cooling and optimising the facility water system to reduce the energy required for cooling. Liquid cooling is increasingly required for high-density AI training environments and is being adopted more broadly as rack power densities continue to rise.
The financial impact of that efficiency compounds at scale. By minimising the energy required for cooling, the solution lowers the electricity cost of running the facility year after year, directly reducing operating expenditure over the life of the asset. It can also reduce the total electrical infrastructure the data center needs to build in the first place, cutting capital cost per megawatt of IT capacity delivered.
Perhaps most significantly for operators, higher cooling efficiency shifts the balance of power draw away from cooling and toward IT equipment: for a given grid connection or generation capacity, more of that power can be allocated to revenue-generating IT capacity rather than being consumed by the cooling infrastructure. That translates into more revenue-generating capacity from the same infrastructure investment — improving both capital utilisation and long-term return on investment — while also reducing the facility's overall environmental footprint.
A Solution for AI Workloads
Large Language Model (LLM) training generates extremely rapid and significant fluctuations in server heat load, placing unprecedented demands on cooling systems. Conventional chiller installations can be challenged by such rapid load variations, particularly when required to maintain stable supply water temperatures for liquid cooling systems.
To address this challenge, CTS Group and Daikin have jointly developed a patented cooling concept. It combines an enhanced facility water system and maximised free-cooling with a fully optimised system design and dedicated buffer pipe technology. The solution enables rapid response to sudden load variations while maintaining highly stable water temperatures supplied to Coolant Distribution Units (CDUs) managing liquid-cooled AI servers.
The concept's dynamic response has been validated through full-scale factory testing, confirming its ability to maintain stable water temperatures under representative AI load profiles and during electrical short-break events.
Setting a New Benchmark
CTS Group designs and prefabricates complete, factory-tested cooling skids at its production campuses, incorporating Daikin chillers and CDUs together with other core cooling components. By combining CTS Group’s modular engineering and prefabrication capabilities with Daikin’s cooling technologies, controls and application expertise, the partnership provides operators with a scalable approach to reducing facility energy overhead and accelerating deployment. The resulting improvements in cooling efficiency can help lower operating costs, increase the proportion of available power allocated to IT equipment, and improve returns on AI infrastructure investment