Advanced Cooling Technologies, known in the industry as ACT, has announced a manufacturing expansion in Lancaster, Pennsylvania targeting approximately 500,000 cold plates per year. The facility is 50,000 square feet. Production ramps in phases. The product scope covers single-phase and two-phase cold plates for AI processors and accelerated computing platforms.
The expansion follows Blackstone Energy Transition Partners reaching a definitive agreement in February 2026 to acquire a majority stake in ACT. Bryan Muzyka, VP of Sales and Marketing, and Devin Pellicone, Head of Data Center Solutions, are the named executives on the announcement. The Blackstone acquisition provides the capital structure for exactly this kind of manufacturing scale investment.
Cold plate supply has been a constraint in liquid cooling deployment for two years. Operators with approved power, cleared permits, and CDU contracts have watched deployment schedules slip because the cold plates that connect GPU cold rails to the distribution loop were backordered. The constraint is not exotic: it is machined copper with precisely controlled internal channel geometry, leak testing, and corrosion-resistant surface treatment. The tooling capacity is the bottleneck.
500,000 units annually is a serious ramp. For reference: a single rack with Nvidia GB200 NVL72 hardware has 72 GPUs, each requiring a cold plate on the CPU and a separate cold plate on the HBM stack. A 100-megawatt AI training cluster built on GB200 NVL72 density runs approximately 800 racks, requiring on the order of 115,000 cold plates for the GPU layer alone before counting CPUs, NIC cooling, and power module cold plates. ACT's 500,000-unit annual capacity covers multiple large-scale AI deployments.
ACT is explicitly framing the Lancaster expansion as a domestic U.S. manufacturing play. The company's language around "highly thermally efficient, reliable, repeatable, and scalable for high-volume deployment domestically" is partly technical and partly supply chain positioning. Cold plates sourced from Asian manufacturers face the same tariff exposure as other precision machined components under the current trade policy environment. A Pennsylvania facility with phased production ramps offers operators supply chain certainty that a foreign-sourced cold plate program cannot.
The Bessemer Venture Partners analysis published this week identified transformer lead times stretching to five years and switchgear backlogs exceeding 60 weeks as the primary infrastructure constraints on data center construction timelines. Cold plate availability operates on a faster cycle, but it sits inside the same bottleneck logic: the thermal component that connects the GPU to the facility cooling loop is the unit that governs whether a deployment hits its commissioning date. ACT scaling to 500,000 units in a domestic facility is the supply chain response to a demand signal that has been visible since 2024.