- The AI boom is driving rising demand for liquid cooling tech
- Vendors are expanding manufacturing capacity, but not all have U.S. plants
- Fierce has a rundown of where all the major liquid cooling players make their gear
U.S. President Donald Trump wants to turn the country into an AI empire. Data center operators are hopping to it, but there’s a hitch in their expansion plans — new high-power GPUs require liquid cooling. And tariffs make it important where those cooling products are made.
CoolIT, Vertiv, JetCool, LiquidStack, Iceotope and Airsys are all players in this burgeoning liquid cooling market. While not everyone has U.S. manufacturing facilities today, all are scrambling to mitigate the impact of tariffs. U.S. manufacturing won’t eliminate tariff-driven component costs, but it will help lower prices for end users.
Here's the rundown:
Vertiv and JetCool appear to be sitting pretty with U.S. manufacturing presence. A Vertiv representative told Fierce the company has five manufacturing locations in the U.S., including two in South Carolina, two in Ohio, and one in Nebraska. Products made in those facilities include “power, cooling and integrated solutions,” the rep said.
JetCool, which was fortunate to be acquired by U.S.-based manufacturing company Flex late last year, has plants in at least three U.S. states, including South Carolina, Texas and California. It has seven million square feet of manufacturing space in the country and another nine million in Mexico.
A company rep told Fierce it is “actively ramping manufacturing capacity, especially for our new Coolant Distribution Unit (CDU), which is in demand as AI data centers scale beyond the capabilities of air cooling.” JetCool’s rep said it sees “strong interest” in its cold plates for OEM and hyperscale servers.
AIRSYS is an up-and-coming player in the liquid cooling market that counts several of the “magnificent seven” companies (that is, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Broadcom, Meta Platforms, Microsoft and NVIDIA) among its clients. The company just broke ground on a new $40 million manufacturing facility in South Carolina that will produce 20 of its products.
AIRSYS President Paul Quigley told Fierce the new plant will provide a “400% increase over today's U.S. production, with even more capacity in the works for 2028.”
CoolIT last year announced plans to increase its manufacturing capacity drastically. The company has a manufacturing facility in Calgary, Canada. While its kit is still subject to U.S. tariffs, the rates are much lower than those for, say, gear that’s made in China and shipped over. CoolIT did not respond to a query on whether it has a U.S. facility.
Asked whether the tariff kerfluffle has impacted orders, CEO Jason Waxman told Fierce “we continue to see strong demand for our liquid cooling products from OEM, ODM, and hyperscale customers.” He added that while the tariff situation remains “fluid,” the company has been able to mitigate tariffs “through our global supply chain and manufacturing operations.”
Icetope declined to comment, but public information shows it has a manufacturing facility in the U.K. Last year, the company also announced a new headquarters location in North Carolina, which appears to contain its sales and marketing operations rather than manufacturing.