Johnson Controls has published the second document in its AI Factory Reference Design Guide series, this one covering air-cooled chiller plants. The guide addresses data centers up to a 1 GW AI factory and is offered as a reference architecture rather than a product, so nothing here ships, prices or has a lead time attached.
What the document specifies is the thermal chain. It integrates air-cooled YORK centrifugal chillers, naming the YDAM and YVAM models, together with fan coil walls and coolant distribution units, and it is built to carry both air-cooled and liquid-cooled IT loads in the same facility. Sizing references are provided for 220 MW compute clusters, including recommended design temperatures and operating conditions at each stage of the chain.
The company sets out five outcomes it says the design enables. Bifurcated loops for the air and liquid cooling systems return 50 MW to the AI factory. Intelligent use of redundant chillers is credited with a 32 percent improvement in annual energy consumption, and quantifying and mitigating heat island effects around air-cooled chiller plants with a further 20 MW of peak power savings.
Water is the fourth claim. The design eliminates cooling towers for facility water, which the company says removes over 12 million gallons of daily consumption.
The fifth turns on temperature. Raising chilled water temperature to support warm-water Technology Cooling System loops is put at a 30 percent improvement in coefficient of performance and 27 percent fewer chillers, which is the figure with the most direct effect on capital cost and plant footprint.
Absolute numbers arrive without a stated facility size. A buyer cannot tell whether the 12 million gallons, the 50 MW and the 20 MW describe the 1 GW ceiling, the 220 MW reference cluster or something else. All five outcomes are attributed to a design on paper rather than measured at a commissioned plant, and no independent party is named as having run them. Commissioning data from a facility built to the guide, with measured energy and water use set against the modelled figures, is what would settle it.
Sequence matters for anyone specifying a plant now. This guide follows a water-cooled chiller guide the company released in February, and Johnson Controls says guides covering absorption chillers and direct-to-chip liquid cooling are still to come. A buyer choosing a cooling topology today has two of the four documents in hand, and the missing pair includes direct-to-chip, the loop that carries coolant closest to the silicon.
"At gigawatt scale, AI factories require a fundamentally different way of thinking about infrastructure," said Austin Domenici, president, Johnson Controls Global Data Center Solutions. What the guide supplies against that ambition is design temperatures, operating conditions and equipment selections at 220 MW, with no capital cost, no commissioning schedule and no named reference customer in the announcement.
For infrastructure buyers, the practical value is a vendor-published sizing baseline they can hold their own engineering firm's numbers against, at a scale where in-house reference data is thin. The gap to watch is the missing denominator on the savings claims, because a 12 million gallon figure means one thing against a gigawatt and something else entirely against 220 MW.
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