Part of the day: Chillers & compressors

Assembled by the nightly build from this catalog’s own entry for Chillers & compressors (6.01, Layer 6 — Facility cooling & HVAC). The tables below are rebuilt every night; published 2026-10-15.

Chillers use a vapor-compression or absorption cycle, built around a compressor, to produce chilled water for the facility’s cooling loop.

Chillers sit at the facility side of the cooling chain, producing the chilled water that circulates through CRAH units (6.03) and, for liquid-cooled halls, through the facility water loop (6.05) toward the CDU interface described in Layer 5. Chiller type — centrifugal, screw, magnetic-bearing, or absorption — governs efficiency at part load, which matters more for data centers than for typical buildings because IT load runs near-constant rather than swinging with occupancy or weather. Densification pushes plants toward larger, fewer chiller blocks and toward warmer chilled-water setpoints that stretch the hours dry coolers (6.02) can carry the load without compressors engaging at all. Compressors are the component most exposed to broader HVAC demand: large chiller orders queue behind commercial and industrial cooling demand as well as data center demand, so lead time is a scheduling variable in its own right. Investors should watch order backlogs at the major chiller OEMs, how much of a campus’s cooling load compressors actually carry versus free-cooling hours, and the split between mechanical-first and adiabatic-first plant designs.

AI delta: AI training and inference loads keep chiller plants at sustained near-full utilization instead of the intermittent duty conventional HVAC chillers are sized for, favoring larger, efficiency-optimized plants and pulling chiller lead times into the same order queue as other heavy mechanical and electrical equipment.

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