Endeavour and Danfoss develop water-free cooling solution for AI-ready data centers

The collaboration delivers an innovative cooling approach that minimizes water consumption while supporting high-performance, energy-efficient operation in next-generation AI and high-density data centers.

  www.danfoss.com

Application Area: Data Center Cooling Systems, High-Density Thermal Management, Water-Free Liquid Cooling Infrastructure
Industry Sector: Information Technology, AI Infrastructure, Utilities & Energy Management

Data center operator Endeavour, alongside its subsidiary ThermalWorks, has partnered with Danfoss to implement an integrated, zero-water cooling architecture designed to support high-density and artificial intelligence (AI) computing workloads. The deployment introduces a unified system design that eliminates ongoing water usage while systematically reducing facility energy consumption. By shifting away from traditional evaporative heat rejection networks to an optimized liquid-cooling and air-recirculation workflow, the organization establishes stable thermal baselines and minimizes environmental resource overhead.

Overcoming High-Density Thermal Loads and Water Consumption Trade-offs
The rapid scale-up of AI training models and high-density enterprise computing clusters introduces severe thermal management challenges for modern infrastructure providers. As server rack power densities escalate, conventional air-cooling systems become insufficient to extract concentrated heat loads from processing chips. Historically, data centers have relied on direct evaporative cooling or open-loop cooling tower configurations to manage these high thermal outputs. While effective at lowering air temperatures, these traditional evaporative processes consume millions of liters of water annually, creating operational dependencies on local water utilities and increasing environmental overhead in water-stressed regions.

Operationally, the engineering goal focused on achieving a highly efficient Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) ratio without relying on water evaporation or continuous water recharge cycles. Managing this requirement without sacrificing compute stability demanded an integrated environment that optimizes thermal pathways across both infrastructure components and facility architecture. To build out this infrastructure, Endeavour and ThermalWorks chose to co-develop a specialized layout leveraging the multi-component data center portfolio of Danfoss. The deployment process relied on a collaborative, engineering-led relationship featuring joint technical workshops and innovation sprints to refine the system configuration prior to full-scale rollout.




Implementing a Specialized Zone Chiller Configuration to Protect System Capacity
The co-developed cooling configuration transforms data center thermal management into an integrated, software-defined workflow:

• Asynchronous High-Density Heat Extraction: The structural design focuses on direct optimization for liquid-cooled server loads. Closed-loop liquid circuits intercept heat at the processing source, preventing thermal energy from dissipating into the surrounding room and maximizing the heat-exchange performance of the internal fluid loop.

• Zone Chiller Architecture Implementation: To manage ambient thermal variables, the engineering teams developed a dedicated product segment known as the zone chiller concept. This configuration isolates and cools the remaining air sections surrounding the localized hardware enclosures rather than conditioning the entire facility volume uniformly.

• Energy Consumption Reduction: By segregating primary liquid-cooled compute components from secondary ambient air zones, the zone chiller platform achieves a documented energy reduction of over 30%. This architectural division prevents the unnecessary over-cooling of space, providing significant savings on overall electrical utility overhead.

• Scalable Zero-Water Operation: The complete mechatronic layout functions as a fully water-free cooling application at scale. By leveraging closed-loop fluid dynamics, the system achieves deployment readiness across hyperscale, colocation, and enterprise data environments with minimized infrastructure requirements.

• Water Consumption Management: Under a traditional evaporative cooling workflow, resource consumption is high; cooling systems require continuous potable water makeup streams to replace losses from continuous evaporation, bleed-off cycles, and drift. Conversely, an integrated closed-loop liquid-cooling architecture achieves zero water consumption because the loop fills once during construction and recirculates the fluid medium indefinitely without open atmospheric exposure.

• Compute Performance and Density Support: Legacy air-recirculation setups offer low density scalability, as they are typically limited to server rack configurations below 15 to 20 kilowatts before experiencing severe airflow bottlenecks and local thermal throttling. A specialized liquid-to-chip environment delivers high density scalability, reliably supporting power-dense AI deployments exceeding 50 to 100 kilowatts per rack without risking silicon damage or performance constraints.

• Heat Transfer Efficiency and Parasitic Loads: Traditional mechanical chiller networks require high parasitic fan and pump energy to move massive volumes of conditioned air across wide server spaces, which penalizes the facility PUE under fluctuating ambient climates. An advanced zone chilling setup provides optimized heat transfer efficiency; it elevates the localized cooling fluid temperature variance and isolates the auxiliary air handling units, cutting mechanical load demands and stabilizing the system's operational coefficient of performance.

www.danfoss.com