What LG’s 2.6 MW CDU Milestone Means for the Market

LG Electronics has secured official qualification for its 2.6-megawatt (MW) Coolant Distribution Unit (CDU) on NVIDIA’s DSX AI Factory platform, marking a major development in thermal management.

A single 2.6 MW unit can handle the thermal load of thousands of ultra-high-density GPUs. The milestone signals that cooling has entered the megawatt era, with thermal management now a primary enabler of AI expansion.

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How the CDU handles heat

As AI processors push server-rack densities higher, traditional air cooling is reaching its physical limits. Fans cannot move air quickly enough to draw heat away from tightly packed silicon. LG’s 2.6 MW CDU represents the new standard in direct-to-chip (DTC) liquid-cooling architecture.

A CDU acts as an isolated heat exchanger and pumping station. It circulates specialised cooling fluid directly across GPU cold plates in a secondary loop, then transfers the collected heat into the building’s main water system through the primary loop. Keeping the server-fluid loop separate from facility water lines protects sensitive IT hardware from contamination and pressure fluctuations, while maintaining precise temperature and flow control.

Moving from small, rack-mounted liquid coolers to a centralised 2.6 MW unit also changes the scale of deployment. Data-centre operators can cool entire AI clusters through a single, highly efficient distribution hub.

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What the milestone means for the cooling market

LG’s qualification reflects a broader trend: liquid cooling is moving from a specialised niche into a mainstream industrial sector. A CDU, however, moves heat out of the server room; it does not eliminate it. Once the heat reaches the facility’s primary water loop, it still has to be rejected into the outside atmosphere. That creates a direct effect across the central chiller and refrigerant supply chain.

To support megawatt-scale CDUs, data centres are building massive primary chiller plants capable of continuous, heavy-duty heat rejection. Because these facilities operate around the clock and face strict sustainability requirements, primary chiller manufacturers are designing systems around refrigerants intended to remain viable over the long term. The market is shifting rapidly toward ultra-low-GWP synthetics such as R-1234ze and R-1233zd, and natural refrigerants including carbon dioxide (R-744), ammonia (R-717) and propane (R-290).

Tightening EU and UK F-gas quota caps add a further consideration. Data-centre developers operating large chiller infrastructure must prioritise refrigerants that avoid quota scarcity and long-term regulatory risk.

LG’s qualification with NVIDIA shows that high-density liquid cooling is now an essential part of global technology infrastructure. For the HVACR industry, success in the AI era will depend on pairing advanced thermal hardware such as LG’s CDUs with primary chiller systems built around compliant, low-GWP refrigerant architectures.