Summary
- Valeo reports 38% greater cooling capacity and 25% lower fan electricity consumption than the copper design used for its comparison.
- The aluminium heat exchanger is intended for rear-door cooling modules and fan-wall applications.
- Accelerated coating tests have exceeded a ten-year operating-life equivalent, while OVHcloud has also run the technology under live conditions.
Valeo is moving an aluminium heat exchanger towards data centre deployment after validation work with OVHcloud reported higher cooling capacity and lower fan electricity consumption than the traditional copper design used for comparison.
The automotive supplier says its aluminium technology delivered a 38% increase in cooling capacity, 65% higher power density and a 25% reduction in fan electricity consumption. Those figures come from Valeo’s own validation programme and describe the tested design rather than an independently established performance level for every data centre cooling system.
The heat exchanger is intended for rear-door cooling modules and fan walls inside data centre white space. Both approaches intercept hot server air closer to the rack than conventional room-level cooling and transfer the thermal load into a liquid circuit.
Rear-door units attach a heat exchanger to the exhaust side of a rack, while fan walls can move air through a larger heat-exchange surface serving part of a room or aisle. As rack density rises, reducing the electrical energy required to move that air becomes more significant because cooling fans form part of the facility’s non-IT power demand.
Valeo’s design replaces copper with aluminium, drawing on manufacturing experience from automotive thermal systems. Aluminium can reduce component weight and alter manufacturing economics, but corrosion control becomes a central design requirement when equipment is expected to operate continuously within a liquid circuit for many years.
Testing is focused on long-term material behaviour
Valeo says accelerated testing of its coating has already reached the equivalent of more than ten years of operating life and is continuing towards 15 years. OVHcloud has separately been operating the technology under real-time conditions for several months.
The two forms of validation address different risks. Accelerated laboratory testing compresses long-term material exposure into a shorter period, while operation in a data centre introduces real coolant chemistry, temperature variation, flow conditions, maintenance practices and contamination risks.
Those variables can affect aluminium differently from the simplified environment of a laboratory rig. Long-term performance will therefore depend on the heat-exchanger material, coating, coolant chemistry and the operating practices used across the complete loop.
The reported cooling gains also reflect exchanger geometry rather than aluminium alone. Thermal performance depends on surface area, airflow, liquid temperature, flow rate and the pressure drop that fans and pumps must overcome.
A heat exchanger capable of removing more heat for the same fan input can reduce one part of the cooling electrical load. If the design requires substantially higher liquid flow or pumping pressure, some of that benefit can move elsewhere in the mechanical system, which is why whole-system validation remains necessary.
Rear-door cooling offers a retrofit route
Valeo is positioning the exchanger for new racks and upgrades to existing data halls. The retrofit case is significant because much of Europe’s operating estate was designed around lower rack densities and may not be able to support new AI hardware through room air cooling alone.
Rear-door systems can remove more heat at rack level without requiring every server to support direct-to-chip liquid cooling. They still need a facility liquid circuit and sufficient external heat rejection, but they allow some existing equipment to remain air-cooled while reducing the amount of hot air released into the room.
That makes the technology different from cold-plate cooling, where coolant is taken directly to processors or other high-heat components. Operators can use the two approaches separately or together depending on server design, rack density and the cooling infrastructure available within a hall.
Valeo says it has spent more than two years developing the data centre technology and is preparing to scale production. OVHcloud’s involvement provides an operator environment for testing the design against data centre operating conditions rather than relying solely on automotive validation methods.
No commercial order, installed megawatt figure or measured facility-level efficiency improvement has been disclosed. Claims around PUE or carbon performance should therefore remain separated from the specific heat-exchanger measurements until the equipment has been evaluated as part of a complete cooling system.
The present milestone is narrower but technically relevant: aluminium has passed a substantial part of Valeo’s durability programme while the exchanger has produced higher thermal capacity and lower fan consumption in the company’s comparison. Broader deployment will depend on whether those characteristics persist when the product is integrated with pumps, controls, coolant distribution and heat rejection at operational scale.
