- Orbis is bringing a new 2 MW CDU to the data center cooling market
- The company got its start working on motors and pumps for EVs
- It thinks its robust supply chain will help it quickly ramp to serve CDU-hungry neocloud customers
There’s something to be said for an outside perspective. And that’s exactly what Orbis is aiming to bring to the data center cooling arena with its new 2 MW row-end coolant distribution unit (CDU).
Orbis CEO Marcus Hays told Fierce its CDU is based on technology originally developed for electric vehicle systems and thus comes with a much smaller footprint than other CDUs.
“In the space of our nearest 2 MW competitor, we can run 4 MW,” he said.
Founded in 2014, Orbis Electric has hitherto focused on building highly efficient, high performance motors, generators and pumps for electric vehicles as well as marine and aerospace systems. In July, it introduced HaloDrive, an axial flux motor designed to provide in-wheel propulsion for cars and to replace diesel generators in commercial refrigeration trucks (think the ones grocery stores use for food).
But it turns out the company has found another use for HaloDrive in the data center. Namely, it’s now peddling HaloDrive as a coolant distribution unit.
This might seem like a weird leap, but Hays explained there’s actually a lot of overlap between what it was already doing and the liquid cooling systems proliferating in data centers.
“What we observed was that in the liquid cooling realm, glycol water direct to chip, for example, is exactly how electric cars work,” he told Fierce, adding that it found additional similarities between data center liquid cooling and the electric refrigeration systems it has created. “What we saw was this completely familiar landscape.”
From there, he said, it was kind of a no-brainer to make the leap into data center cooling.
“People have been throwing systems at this trying to catch up with the rate at which GPUs are processing to try to manage heat. So, there are a lot of Band-Aids throughout the system,” he said. “As outsiders, we had this opportunity to come in really on a holistic level and design a system that strips out this sort of Band-Aid like construction to get to a high efficiency, small footprint.”
Orbis is looking to carve out a slice in what is a rapidly growing market. New data from Synergy Research Group shows that there is a known pipeline of at least 770 hyperscale data center facilities. And Dell’Oro Group’s latest research found that worldwide Data Center Physical Infrastructure (DCPI) revenue grew 18 percent year-over-year (YOY) in 3Q 2025. DCPI includes cooling systems.
In its report, Dell’Oro noted that the direct liquid cooling revenue jumped 85% YOY in the quarter and is “on pace to exceed $2 billion in yearly revenue as adoption broadens across large AI clusters.”
But of course, Orbis isn’t the only one chasing this revenue. It is up against CDU offerings from the likes of CoolIT, Vertiv, Schneider Electric, Motivair and Accelsius, just to name a few.
Hays, however, thinks Orbis is up for the challenge and is starting from a stronger position than a startup entering the space. Why? It already has a robust supply chain in place thanks to its EV business. That’s a major advantage in an industry where demand is ramping so rapidly that supply is becoming a bottleneck.
“Because of our automotive supply chain, where we derive all of our technology or the bulk of it from the automotive supply chain, I call us the carpool lane on a crowded afternoon on a freeway,” he said. “We can definitely move our customers out of these supply chain bottlenecks very quickly.”
As for its target audience, Hays said Orbis plans to focus squarely on neocloud providers. “That’s a big opportunity and big enough for us,” he concluded.