Data centers make a lot of heat, and most of it goes to waste. The chips warm a loop of water, the water carries the heat outside, and cooling towers or chillers dump it into the air. The building pays once to make that heat and again to get rid of it.
We've been working on the other option: reuse it. Water that leaves a data center warm enough can heat nearby offices, homes, or greenhouses instead of the sky. The industry calls this waste-heat recovery. We're proud to share that the Open Compute Project (OCP) has given Phasic its Sustainability Award for advancing sustainable data center cooling through heat exchanger technology.
What we build
OCP is the industry group where large data center operators publish open hardware designs, so everyone can build to the same plans.
A heat exchanger is the part where the hot loop from the chips hands its heat to the building's water. Most are stamped from metal plates. Ours are 3D printed, which lets us shape the channels inside for two jobs at once: moving heat well and letting water flow freely. Water that leaves hot, without the pumps working overtime, is water a heat buyer can use.
What's next
We'd like to hear what your facility does with its heat today, because every data center throws away heat somebody nearby could use, and we'd like to help change that.
Update, October 2026: We've since built a 1 megawatt heat exchanger, made of two 500 kilowatt halves, for Project Deschutes, an OCP design that describes how a liquid-cooled data center moves heat from the racks to the building. We'll show it at the OCP Global Summit in San Jose, October 12 to 15, 2026. Find us at booth S12.