Vertiv (NYSE: VRT), a global provider of critical digital infrastructure and continuity solutions, unveiled an upgraded testing room at its thermal management centre near Tognana, Italy. This sizeable investment significantly increases the facility’s testing capacity and manufacturing capabilities in the existing space and demonstrates Vertiv’s ongoing commitment to the advancement of chilled water systems to help drive liquid cooling adoption. It also shows the company’s support of increasing demands on data centres, including high-performance computing, artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI (GenAI).

The upgraded testing room will allow Vertiv to do standard and tailored tests of customer equipment, spanning all of the cooling solutions in its product portfolio - both air and water-cooled, balancing a thermal load greater than 2MW with a chamber air temperature up to 55°C. Moreover, Vertiv will also be able to test units equipped with low global warming potential (GWP) refrigerants.

This upgrade comes at a critical time for the data centre industry. Operators are expanding rapidly to meet increasing capacity needs, whilst at the same time seeking to minimise their environmental impact. More than 100 European data centre operators and trade associations have signed The Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact committing to climate neutrality by 2030. Chilled water systems play a key role in helping to reach this goal by enabling operators to upscale data centre capacity whilst simultaneously limiting direct and indirect emissions. These systems apply low-GWP refrigerants that enable significant reduction of direct and indirect CO2 emissions, decreasing a data centre’s carbon footprint.

“Resource-efficient chilled water solutions are important to the sustainable growth of the data centre industry, and we must continue to focus on how we can evolve and improve the technologies for operators and the environment,” said Karsten Winther, president EMEA at Vertiv. “We are proud of the market-leading work we have achieved for our customers. For example, we worked with sustainability-focused colocation provider Green Mountain to deploy 5 MW of high-efficiency chilled water cooling systems. Enhancing the testing and manufacturing capacity at our Thermal Management facility allows us to continue to innovate in this space 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 chiller up to 2200kW to the EMEA market. This new testing room will enable us to test these larger capacity units,” said Roberto Felisi, senior director, Thermal Global Core Offering & EMEA business leader at Vertiv. “We continue to explore opportunities to further invest in our capabilities to support projected growth and demand for thermal management systems, particularly liquid cooling solutions.”

To celebrate the latest expansion, Vertiv welcomed employees’ families for a special visit to the facility, including the Thermal Management Customer Experience Centre. The open day featured activities designed specifically to engage children and young people, offering insights into data centres and the significance of thermal management. Highlights included guided tours of production lines and primary laboratories, as well as Vertiv’s own data centre which provided a first-hand look at the machines in action. Depending on age, the young visitors could partake in thermodynamics workshops and explore topics such as cold generation and the behaviour of hot and cold air particles. They also got the chance to experience Vertiv’s cutting-edge augmented reality applications, like the Vertiv™ XR app, and navigate a virtual data centre.

This event provided a unique opportunity to demonstrate to children and young attendees the depth of expertise and tools employed by their parents in the development, design, and construction of the data centre infrastructure equipment, while emphasising the option for everyone to engage in STEM studies, fostering a more diverse and inclusive future.