Thermal Management facility in Piove di Sacco (PD), Italy, increases testing and production capabilities to support growing demand for chilled water cooling solutions
Today, Vertiv (NYSE: VRT), a global provider of critical digital infrastructure and continuity solutions, inaugurated a new test room within the Thermal Management Center of Tognana, Italy. The sizable investment significantly increases the facility's testing scope and production capabilities in the existing space and confirms Vertiv's ongoing commitment to advancing the development of chilled water systems to drive the adoption of liquid cooling solutions. It also demonstrates the company's support for the growing demands of data centers, including high-performance computing, artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI (GenAI).
The renovated test room will allow Vertiv to carry out standard and customized tests on customer equipment, including all cooling solutions from its product portfolio, both air-cooled and water-cooled, balancing a thermal load exceeding 2MW with an air temperature inside the room that can reach 55°C. Additionally, Vertiv will also be able to test units equipped with refrigerants with low global warming potential (GWP).
This expansion comes at a critical time for the data center industry. Operators are rapidly expanding to meet growing capacity needs, while seeking to minimize environmental impact. More than 100 European data center operators and trade associations have signed up il Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact committing to climate neutrality by 2030. Chilled water systems play a key role in helping achieve this goal, allowing operators to increase data center capabilities while simultaneously reducing direct and indirect emissions. These systems use low GWP refrigerants which enable a significant reduction in direct and indirect CO2 emissions, therefore decreasing a data center's carbon impacts.
“Resource-efficient chilled water solutions are critical to the sustainable growth of the data center industry and we must continue to strive to evolve and improve technologies for operators and the environment,” said Karsten Winther, president EMEA at Vertiv. "We are proud of the market-leading results we have achieved for our customers. For example, we have partnered with sustainability-minded colocation provider Green Mountain, to implement 5 MW of high efficiency chilled water cooling systems. Improving the testing and manufacturing capabilities of our Thermal Management facility allows us to remain innovative in this industry and deliver even more value to the industry and our customers.”
"In December we will introduce our new Vertiv™ Liebert® AFC High Capacity, Inverter Screw with low GWP refrigerant up to 2200kW to the European market. This new test room will allow us to test this equipment at higher capacities," said Roberto Felisi, senior director, Thermal Global Core Offering & EMEA Business Leader at Vertiv. “We will continue to explore new investment opportunities in our facilities to support expected growth and demand for thermal management systems, with a particular focus on liquid cooling solutions.”
To inaugurate the new facility, Vertiv invited employee families to visit the facility, which also includes the Thermal Management Customer Experience Center. During the open day, activities were organized specifically designed to involve children and young people, offering insights into data centers and the importance of Thermal Management technologies. Highlights included guided tours of the production lines and main laboratories, as well as the Vertiv data center which allowed for an up-close look at the equipment in action. Depending on their age, the young visitors were able to participate in workshops related to the topic of thermodynamics and delve into aspects such as the production of cold and the behavior of hot and cold air particles. They also had the chance to experience Vertiv's most cutting-edge augmented reality applications, such as the Vertiv™ XR app, and explore a virtual data center.
The event offered a unique opportunity to demonstrate to participating children and young people the extent of the skills and tools used by their parents in the development, design and construction of the extraordinary equipment used in data centers, while highlighting the possibility for everyone to engage in STEM studies, promoting a more diverse and inclusive future.
For more information on Vertiv's Customer Experience Center for Thermal Management, see Vertiv.it
