As we step into July, we at CDM are excited to share our insights and best practices on modular data center cooling. This month’s theme is all about staying cool… so don’t be a hottie!
According to Grandview Research, the U.S. data center cooling industry is expected to grow significantly at a CAGR of 10.8% from 2025 to 2030. This growth is driven by increased investments in green data centers, prompted by regulatory and sustainability pressures such as water use and PUE targets.
Companies are increasingly adopting eco-friendly modular data centers and innovative cooling technologies like ambient air cooling and sustainable refrigerants to reduce their carbon footprints. As high-performance computing (HPC) and applications like AI, inference, and cloud services continue to advance, data center cooling technologies must evolve to support these power-intensive applications while maintaining cost-effective and energy-efficient operations.
The Strategic Role of Modular Cooling
Modular cooling is a critical part of the design process, as customer requirements can vary dramatically from site to site and workload to workload. Providing a range of cooling options is essential to achieving the efficiency, sustainability, and speed that today’s compute environments demand, capabilities that most traditional data centers do not offer.
Modular data centers allow users to tailor cooling solutions for each unique application, including:
- AI and GPU workloads require high-capacity cooling, often beyond the capabilities of standard air-based systems.
- Edge deployments, depending on where they are situated, may face power and water constraints, making traditional cooling impractical.
- Environmental factors like cold, and high-altitude locations present different thermal challenges that cannot be addressed by one cooling solution.
The beauty of modular construction is that each module can be engineered with cooling that fits the specific environment and IT load, rather than forced into a one-size-fits-all system. CDM’s customer-centric, vendor agnostic approach to modular design allows us to build optimized cooling solutions for each deployment.
- Collaborate with customers to understand their power densities, environmental conditions, energy goals, and future growth plans.
- Design and engineer the right cooling solution—whether air, liquid, hybrid, or free cooling—to align with the specific site and workload.
- Build modules in a factory setting and test integrated cooling systems before shipping, ensuring they are ready to deploy and minimizing on-site complexity and go-live timelines.
To learn more about CDM and our modular data center philosophy, contact us.
