Carrier Global Corporation has formed an investment and technology partnership with Strategic Thermal Labs (STL).
Through this investment, Carrier will leverage STL's groundbreaking technology for a liquid cooling solution for data centres.
The liquid cooling market is expected to approach USD3 to 5 billion by 2028 driven by greenfield AI data centre builds that will bring significantly higher rack power densities.
Liquid cooling accounts for roughly two per cent of overall cooling solutions within the data centre today and is expected to increase to almost 30 per cent by 2028.
Carrier’s senior vice president, Global Services, Business Development & Chief Strategy Officer, Ajay Agrawal, said direct-to-chip liquid cooling is significantly more efficient than traditional cooling methods and critical to data centres of the future as AI and other technologies continue to fuel the global demand for high-density computing.
"Together with STL, we will help to significantly reduce data centre energy consumption, while also providing customers with a highly scalable solution,” Agrawal said.
As part of the financial investment, Carrier will receive a board seat in STL, along with exclusivity for a highly differentiated solution.
The investment in STL follows Carrier's acquisition of leading data centre infrastructure management (DCIM) provider Nlyte in 2021.
Carrier's Nlyte DCIM tools share detailed information between HVAC equipment, power systems and servers/workloads that run within data centres, providing unprecedented transparency and control of the infrastructure for improved uptime.
STL president, Austin Shelnutt, said data centre power consumption is surging at unprecedented rates with a significant portion of that power increase belonging to inefficient cooling technology.
“The world needs highly innovative cooling solutions that can enable the next generation of computer infrastructure while using far less energy in the process,” he said.
“Coupling the legacy of Carrier's energy efficient infrastructure solutions with STL's unique depth and breadth of expertise in data centre cooling is highly synergistic.
“We believe this partnership will be incredibly powerful in the fight to mitigate global energy consumption."
Strategic Thermal Labs, LLC (STL) is an Austin-area heat transfer research and development company with industry renowned expertise in data centre liquid cooling.
Carrier has also committed to investing more than $2 billion by 2030 to develop intelligent climate and energy solutions that incorporate sustainable design principles and reduce lifecycle impacts.