Next-gen GPUs may not need chillers — but data centers do

At the start of 2026, a casual remark by Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang created turbulence in the data center cooling industry. In a speech at the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Huang said Nvidia's next generation of rack-scale compute systems set to debut in 2026 will accept water coolant temperatures as high as 45°C (113°F) despite using double the power. This means, Huang said, that: "No water chillers are necessary, we're basically cooling [...] with hot water."

Such a remark about a detail of facility infrastructure should amount to no more than a casual talking point within engineering circles. But everything Nvidia does is scrutinized microscopically, and every detail seems huge. In the hours following Huang's presentation, shares of chiller vendors fell, in some cases by as much as 10%. Most have yet to fully recover.