Munters just booked more than 2.1 billion SEK ($200 million+) in data center cooling orders in 2025. That is a record for the Swedish company. And the money tells a very specific story about where the thermal management industry is heading: toward vertically integrated suppliers who can ship complete chilled water systems from a single campus, on a timeline that hyperscalers will actually tolerate.
The crown jewel in that order book is an $82 million deal for Geoclima Circlemiser chillers destined for a large AI facility operated by an unnamed US colocation provider. Deliveries start mid-2026. A second order, worth roughly 840 million SEK (around $91 million), covers another batch of Circlemiser units for a different US colocation operator, with shipments running from Q4 2026 through Q1 2027. Both contracts include service and commissioning, which means Munters is selling the full lifecycle, not just boxes on a truck.
Stefan Aspman, who leads Munters' Data Center Technologies business, framed the $82 million win as proof of concept. "Just over a year after acquiring Geoclima, we're proud to win this order from a new customer for a demanding application," he said. The phrase "demanding application" is doing a lot of work there. AI inference and training clusters run hotter and denser than traditional enterprise compute. Cooling them requires equipment that can reject enormous heat loads without consuming the power budget that the GPUs need for themselves.
The Geoclima Circlemiser is not just a rebadged commodity chiller. Its defining feature is a cylindrical microchannel condenser that increases the heat exchange surface by 45% compared to traditional condensers while maintaining the same physical footprint. That is a real engineering trick: more heat rejection area crammed into the same envelope of steel and copper. Paired with a cascade flooded evaporator design, the Circlemiser raises evaporation temperatures and lowers the temperature differential between evaporation and fluid outlet. The net result is an EER (energy efficiency ratio) improvement of up to 15% over Geoclima's own Turbomiser line, with the best units hitting 4.35 kW/kW. Multi-compressor configurations capture the full 15% gain. Single-compressor units still pull roughly 9.5%. The platform supports both R134a and HFO-1234ze refrigerants, giving operators a path toward lower-GWP options without a full system redesign. In a market where every watt matters and every square foot of mechanical yard is contested, a chiller that delivers more cooling per unit of space and power is exactly the product hyperscalers are hunting for.
Munters is putting its manufacturing where its customers are building. The company is expanding its Daleville, Virginia facility by 200,000 square feet with a $29.95 million investment, adding 270 jobs. The expansion, at the Botetourt Center at Greenfield, sits adjacent to Munters' existing plant and will create a dedicated Data Center Technologies production campus. Construction started in spring 2025. Completion target: Q2 2026.
The location is strategic in the most literal sense. Northern Virginia houses the largest concentration of data center capacity on the planet, with operators including Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta all racing to energize multi-gigawatt campuses across Loudoun, Prince William, and Fauquier counties. Munters is planting a factory within driving distance of its biggest customers. Combined with its Texas facility, the Virginia expansion gives Munters nearly 700,000 square feet of US production space dedicated to data center cooling. The campus will also house a new chiller test laboratory, which matters more than it sounds. Testing chillers at full load before they ship eliminates the kind of field commissioning delays that can push a data center's go-live date by weeks.
Chiller production for the US market became operational by end of Q1 2026. That means the $82 million order will ship from Virginia, not from Geoclima's original factory in northeastern Italy. Larger units, specifically the SyCool chillers, will still come from Italy. But the smaller and mid-range products, including chilled water air handling units, fan coil arrays, and coolant distribution units for liquid cooling, will roll off the Daleville line.
Here is the real tension underneath these announcements. Data center operators globally are planning to build somewhere between 30 and 50 GW of new capacity over the next five years. Every megawatt of IT load needs a corresponding megawatt (or more) of cooling. The cooling equipment industry was not built for this kind of demand surge. Lead times for chillers stretched past 40 weeks during the 2022-2023 boom. They compressed slightly in 2024 as some hyperscaler projects got delayed or rescoped. Now AI spending is reaccelerating, and the bottleneck is shifting back to mechanical equipment.
Munters is making a bet that proximity and integration will win. By manufacturing chillers, CRAHs, CDUs, and fan coils under one roof in Virginia, the company can offer something that very few competitors can: a single purchase order for the complete chilled water cooling plant, produced domestically, with a commissioning team attached. That eliminates the coordination tax that operators pay when they source condensers from one vendor, air handlers from another, and liquid cooling distribution from a third.
The 2.1 billion SEK order haul in 2025 proves the thesis is working. But Munters is still a mid-cap Swedish industrial company competing against Vertiv, Schneider Electric, and Carrier, all of whom have deeper balance sheets and broader installed bases. Aspman's team acquired Geoclima only in 2024. Integrating an Italian chiller manufacturer into a global supply chain while simultaneously building a new factory and fulfilling $200 million in orders is an enormous operational challenge. The kind of challenge where execution risk is real, not theoretical.
What Munters has going for it: a product that genuinely outperforms on efficiency, a factory in the right zip code, and a backlog that funds continued expansion. What it needs to prove: that it can deliver on time, at scale, for the most demanding customers in the world. The next 18 months will determine whether Munters becomes a Tier 1 data center cooling supplier or a cautionary tale about scaling too fast.