Infrastructure giant Schneider Electric powers up with $850M liquid cooling deal

Snags controlling stake in Motivair Corporation, rest to come by 2028

Schneider Electric is taking a controlling interest in Motivair Corporation, a specialist in liquid cooling and thermal management tech for high-performance computing (HPC) systems.

Under the terms of the purchase, Schneider Electric is buying a 75 percent controlling interest in Motivair for an all-cash transaction of $850 million, and intends to buy the rest later.

The acquired biz will slot into Schneider Electric's Energy Management division which houses direct-to-chip liquid cooling and thermal technologies.

French HQ'd Schneider Electric has long served the datacenter market with electrical distribution, UPS kit, racks, and enclosures, and says that while liquid cooling is not a new per se, its application inside bit barns is "a nascent market" that it expects to swell.

This is in no small part due to trends such as generative AI and the introduction of large language models (LLMs), which Schneider acknowledges are catalysts driving greater power requirements.

"This shift to accelerated computing is resulting in new datacenter architectures requiring more efficient cooling solutions, particularly liquid cooling, as traditional air cooling alone cannot mitigate the higher heat generated as a result," Schneider said.

Cooling already accounts for circa 40 percent of the power needed to run a datacenter, according to Digital Realty, and this is only going to grow due to AI. According to Goldman Sachs, AI will fuel a 160 percent rise in the power demands of bit barns by 2030.

Liquid cooling is understood to be more efffective for high denstity server farms than air cooling, though they can consume more water, be environmentally unfriendly and more costly to set up.

Based in Buffalo, New York, Motivair has a background in fitting supercomputers with liquid cooling tech. Motivair president and CEO Rich Whitmore reckons the takeover will help it scale operations and invest in new technologies.

The $850 million transaction is subject to customary closing conditions, including gaining required regulatory approvals, and is expected to close "in the coming quarters."

Schneider says it hopes to buy the remaining 25 percent of Motivair by 2028.

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