Data Center Cooling Equipment

Dry coolers, chillers, heat exchangers and EC-driven fans for continuous sensible cooling — selected around free-cooling hours and PUE rather than nominal capacity.

  • 1,658products across this application
  • 607verified manufacturers
  • 6equipment groups

WhatSensible-only cooling, measured per rack

Data centre cooling is continuous removal of sensible heat from IT equipment. Unlike almost every other HVAC application there is essentially no latent load — servers do not add moisture — so the whole design is about moving heat, and it is measured in kW per rack rather than in tonnes of refrigeration. Rack densities range from around 5 kW in older halls to well over 30 kW in modern AI and HPC deployments.

WhoWho buys data centre cooling

Colocation and hyperscale operators, telecommunications carriers, enterprise IT departments running their own halls, edge-compute deployments at cell sites and industrial premises, and the mechanical and electrical contractors who deliver these projects.

WhereFrom hyperscale halls to edge cabinets

Concentrated in established hubs, but growing fastest at the edge — small halls placed close to the users they serve, often in hot climates and without dedicated on-site staff. Those edge sites push equipment selection towards sealed, low-maintenance designs that will run unattended.

WhenBuild, upgrade and free-cooling retrofit

At new build, at capacity upgrade when rack density outgrows the original design, and increasingly as a free-cooling retrofit on existing halls where the mechanical energy bill has become the operator's largest controllable cost.

WhyDowntime, PUE and the energy share

Two reasons pull in the same direction. Downtime is the obvious one: cooling is a single point of failure for the whole facility, which is why N+1 redundancy is standard rather than optional. The less obvious one is energy — mechanical cooling can account for 30–40% of total facility power, and it is the main lever on PUE. Every hour the site can reject heat without running a compressor goes straight to the bottom line.

HowDesigning around free-cooling hours

Design the water temperatures first, because they determine everything else. Raising chilled water supply to 18–20 °C — which modern IT equipment tolerates comfortably — hugely increases the number of hours per year a dry cooler can reject heat with no compressor running at all. Then select fans with EC motors and variable speed, so fan power falls with the cube of speed as the load drops, and size for N+1 so any single unit can be taken out for service without touching the IT load.

Equipment this application needs

Dry Cooler Free cooling Dry Cooler189 Rejects heat directly to ambient air with no compressor running. The single biggest lever on annual energy use in a temperate or continental climate. Chilling Equipment Mechanical cooling Chilling Equipment88 Carries the load when ambient is too high for free cooling. Sized for the design day but running part-load most of the year, so part-load efficiency matters more than peak COP. Heat Exchangers Circuit separation Heat Exchangers160 Plate exchangers separating the glycol loop from the chilled water loop, and enabling indirect free cooling. Cooling Towers Evaporative rejection Cooling Towers135 Higher rejection capacity per unit footprint where water is available and treatment can be maintained. Centrifugal Fans Air handling Centrifugal Fans414 CRAH and AHU fan sections — EC plug fans with speed control to hold supply temperature as IT load varies. Axial Flow Fans Condenser & cooler fans Axial Flow Fans672 The fan side of dry coolers and condensers, where EC drives and low tip speed cut both energy and noise.

What to check before you order

EC Motor 160
Electronically commutated motors — the efficiency baseline for any modern fan-driven cooling equipment.
Variable Speed 72
Fan power falls roughly with the cube of speed, so part-load hours are where the savings actually are.
Energy Saving 861
PUE is a contractual commitment for most colocation operators, not a marketing claim.
Low Noise 504
Urban and edge sites are frequently permitted on a night-time noise limit at the boundary.
R410A Refrigerant 291
Still common in packaged units; check the phase-down position in your market before standardising on it.

Products for this application

Questions buyers ask

When is free cooling worth specifying?
Wherever the annual hours below your chilled water supply temperature are significant — which, once supply temperature is raised to 18–20 °C, covers most of the year in temperate and continental climates and a useful share of the night hours even in warm ones. The capital cost sits in the dry coolers and the control changeover; the return comes from compressor hours you never run.
Why do data centres use EC fans rather than AC fans with a VFD?
EC motors are more efficient at part load, which is where a data centre fan spends nearly all its life, and they integrate speed control and monitoring into the fan itself rather than requiring a separate drive and its cabinet. On a large fan array the reduced installation and commissioning work is often as valuable as the energy saving.
What does N+1 mean for cooling equipment procurement?
It means buying one more unit than the design load requires, so any single unit can fail or be taken out for maintenance with no reduction in cooling. In practice it also changes how you select: smaller multiple units give better part-load control and a cheaper redundant unit than one large machine plus a full-size spare.

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