Large Chillers

Picture a data centre's servers as a very large kitchen full of ovens running non-stop, day and night, with no option to ever switch them off to cool down. A chiller is the equivalent of that kitchen's central air-conditioning plant, not the small window unit in a bedroom, a large machine, usually built around a centrifugal or screw compressor, whose entire job is to chill water down to a set temperature so that water can then be circulated through the building to absorb heat wherever it is generated.

That chilled water typically travels to computer room air handlers, CRAHs, covered elsewhere on this site, which use it to cool the room's air, or, increasingly, is routed even more directly to server racks themselves under the liquid-cooling approach covered elsewhere on this site, but in either case the chiller sitting at the centre of the plant is doing the actual work of removing heat from the building's water loop.

India's cooling equipment makers have moved quickly to capture this demand, Blue Star reached the final stages of developing proprietary high-efficiency chillers and cooling distribution units specifically for local data centres in 2025, Voltas offers screw and oil-free centrifugal chillers through its mechanical, electrical and plumbing vertical aimed at the segment, and Thermax's KRN business expanded chiller manufacturing capacity roughly six-fold at a new Neemrana facility while separately winning a large United States data centre order for hot-water-driven chillers totalling 45,000 tons of refrigeration.

Even as liquid cooling grows faster in percentage terms, air-based solutions built around chillers, CRAHs and cooling towers, all covered elsewhere on this site, still held roughly two-thirds of the revenue in India's data centre cooling market as of 2025, in a market valued at around $1.8 billion and growing at 9-10% a year, which is why a chiller order remains one of the largest single cooling-equipment line items on most Indian data centre projects even today.