Dive Brief:
- Johnson Controls on Wednesday announced an agreement to acquire Alloy Enterprises, a Boston-based company providing a thermal management platform for high-performance data centers and other mission-critical industrial applications.
- The Boston-based company’s platform uses direct liquid-cooling components to enable up to a 35% improvement in thermal management efficiency, allowing heat to be removed faster and more effectively, with less pressure drop, Johnson Controls said in a release.
- "This acquisition is about enabling our customers to stay ahead of fast-changing compute demands by adding another core technology that enables us to optimize the overall thermal management architecture of a data center,” Lei Schlitz, vice president and president of global products and solutions at Johnson Controls, said in a statement.
Dive Insight:
The move is in line with Johnson Controls’ effort to expand its exposure to data centers and life sciences through cooling reference architectures, new chillers and accompanying software, as CEO Joakim Weidemanis outlined during an earnings call earlier this month.
“Multistory data centers and AI factories are becoming more common, increasing the density of the white space (where the racks live) by up to 10 times,” the company said at the time. “Data center leaders therefore need higher density thermal management solutions to fit a shrinking roofline.”
“Managing energy consumption while sustaining performance is essential, and that is exactly where our technologies remain critical,” Weidemanis said. “Against that backdrop, our data center momentum reflects not only strong demand from existing customers but also success in reaching new customers as our differentiated solutions gain traction.”
Founded in 2020, Alloy Enterprises can allow heat to be removed faster and more effectively, while reducing pressure drop by up to 75% so that fluid can flow more easily, resulting in “materially lower overall cooling system energy use,” Johnson Controls said in its release about the acquisition.
The deal advances Johnson Controls’ thermal management portfolio and aligns with its ambition to deliver highly differentiated cooling solutions for data centers, the company said. These solutions include a proprietary manufacturing process that advances the liquid-cooling efficiency of GPUs and CPUs, memory and networking interfaces, as well as three recently launched YORK chillers and its Silent-Aire Coolant Distribution Unit platform, the company said.
The transaction is expected to be completed in the company’s third fiscal quarter this year, ending June 30.
“With the addition of Alloy Enterprises, we are poised to set new standards in cooling efficiency and capacity and help customers accelerate time-to-market with the right integrated technologies,” Schlitz said. “It will also strengthen our core technology capabilities ... and reinforces our long-term commitment to lead more broadly in advanced thermal management solutions for mission critical applications.”
Other companies that have made recent moves to increase their efforts in the liquid cooling or thermal management spaces include Trane Technologies and Karman Industries. Liquid cooling and thermal management are expected to become more important as innovation in chip design make those kinds of cooling processes more important compared to traditional chillers.
