Valeo unveils aluminum cooling tech for data centers with 38% more capacity
Valeo will present validated aluminum heat-exchanger technology for data-center cooling, developed with OVH Cloud, at the OCP Global Summit 2026, claiming 38% more cooling capacity than copper.
- 38%
- 65%
- 25%
- more than 10 years
What Happened
Valeo will present, with OVH Cloud, the validation status of its aluminum heat exchanger technology for data center thermal management at the Open Compute Project (OCP) Global Summit 2026, which runs October 12-15. The announcement was made October 7, 2026 from San Jose, California. The technology applies to rear door cooling modules for racks or fan walls in the core space of data centers, known as white space, and Valeo describes it as a paradigm shift for the industry. After more than two years of dedicated development in the sector, Valeo says it is demonstrating industrial capability and readiness to scale production.
- +38%
- +65%
- -25%
“Presenting our ongoing work at OCP 2026 represents an important step in our journey within the data center ecosystem. Over the past two years, we have made significant progress in evaluating how aluminum liquid cooling can meet the rigorous reliability and performance standards required by modern high-density facilities. By combining these early testing metrics with our decades of automotive thermal management expertise, we are working to develop scalable thermal solutions to support the industry's evolving infrastructure needs responsibly and effectively.”
Valeo says its aluminum solutions deliver a 38% increase in cooling capacity and 65% in power density versus traditional copper hardware, while reducing fan electrical consumption by 25%, directly optimizing Carbon Usage Effectiveness (CUE) and Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE). To address industry concerns about aluminum corrosion, Valeo has built an accelerated long-run testing framework, while OVH Cloud has been running real-time and real-conditions tests for several months. Testing on Valeo's specific coating has already reached the equivalent of more than 10 years of operating life, matching the standard infrastructure lifespan of the data center industry, and Valeo is currently pushing tests up to 15 years.
- Direct-to-Chip (DLC) systems, both Single-Phase and Two-Phase, for high-density racks
- Zero-Water Immersion Units for Micro-Edge compute applications
Valeo announces from San Jose, California the validation status of its aluminum heat exchanger technology for data center thermal management.
Valeo will present the technology with OVH Cloud at the OCP Global Summit 2026.
Why this matters
AI workloads are pushing data-center rack densities higher, and Valeo says aluminum heat exchangers offer a lightweight, more efficient and scalable alternative to traditional copper hardware, for both retrofits and new racks. That matters to data-center operators weighing cooling upgrades, and to Valeo as it applies decades of automotive thermal expertise to a new industry.
Terms in This Story
- PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness)
- A metric for how efficiently a data center uses energy, calculated as total facility power divided by the power delivered to computing equipment; a lower ratio is better.
- CUE (Carbon Usage Effectiveness)
- A metric for the carbon emissions associated with a data center's energy use, typically carbon emissions divided by IT equipment energy.
- Direct-to-Chip (DLC)
- A liquid cooling approach in which coolant is circulated directly to the processors or components on a chip to remove heat.
- OCP (Open Compute Project)
- An industry organization that shares open designs and specifications for data center hardware and infrastructure.
Summarised from the linked release; details can be imperfect — always verify against the original source.