Mitsubishi Electric US Holdings will put roughly $30 million into a new subsidiary, MEHITS US Inc., to build IT cooling equipment in Mason, Ohio, as Nikkei Asia reported. Production starts in April 2027 on about 14,000 square meters of manufacturing floor inside a 60,000 square meter facility. Those systems are built today by Mitsubishi Electric Hydronics & IT Cooling Systems SpA in Italy and reach North American buyers through Mitsubishi Electric Power Products. Mitsubishi's stated reason is compressing the gap from production to delivery and building against local requirements.
Onshoring cooling hardware had an easy trade case a year ago. The Supreme Court struck the IEEPA reciprocal tariffs on February 20, 2026, and the country surcharges that ran from 10 percent to nearly 50 percent became refundable history. The US and EU then settled at a 15 percent all-inclusive ceiling on EU-origin goods effective July 1. MEHITS ships from Italy, which means the landed duty on an Italian chiller was capped four weeks before Mitsubishi announced a US line to avoid it. Our own March read on cooling tariffs, at Vietnam 46 percent and China 145 percent, describes a world that no longer exists. Anyone still running onshoring models on those numbers is modelling the wrong century of trade policy.
A chiller built in Italy for an Ohio hall gets craned onto a ship, crosses the Atlantic, clears customs, and moves inland before a rigger touches it. Each leg is schedule risk on the system that most often decides whether a project hits its date, and cooling is the single greatest risk in commissioning a 100MW AI data center. Fifteen percent duty on a chiller is a line item a hyperscaler absorbs. Twelve weeks of ocean freight and customs on the critical path is a quarter of revenue on a leased GPU hall. Cooling vendors have spent eighteen months answering that with geography rather than with tariff arbitrage. Munters put chiller production in Virginia next to its biggest customers. Vertiv is doubling chiller output near Padua and adding a test lab while separately expanding in South Carolina and Mexicali.
Mitsubishi says the facility will expand its lineup to include equipment compatible with liquid cooling, which places CDUs, manifolds, and cold plates somewhere after the opening product mix of precision cooling and hydronic equipment MEHITS already builds. At $30 million and 14,000 square meters inside an existing plant, this is a distribution fix with a factory attached, and that is a reasonable thing to buy. Qualifying a liquid cooling product is a different program with a different clock. LG needed NVIDIA AI Factory validation on its 600kW CDU before its unit was specifiable on a Blackwell-class build.
Conserve Ohio collected more than 70,000 of the 413,000 signatures it needed from at least 44 of Ohio's 88 counties, and let the July 1 deadline pass. The constitutional amendment banning data centers above 25 megawatts will not appear on the 2026 ballot. The group has said it is aiming at 2027 and is not standing down: "We want to make it clear: we will not be stopping." Our coverage of the signature drive and the attorney general clearing the summary language for circulation in March stops before that outcome, and readers should treat both as superseded. A 2027 ballot fight would land in the same window the Mason line reaches volume, and the state's business establishment has already organised against the bans.
The Mason line ships to Virginia, Texas, and Georgia as easily as it ships down the road, so the Ohio siting fight decides who buys locally and very little else. The number that matters is how much of the catalog gets built there. A plant that produces part of the range and imports the rest moves average lead time far less than the announcement implies, so operators writing 2027 chiller specifications should get the Mason product list in writing, with the quoted lead time against each line, and confirmation of which models still leave Italy.