Mumbai, India, November 28, 2025- Vertiv has entered a strategic collaboration with the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay to develop and validate thermal-management solutions tailored for AI-intensive data centres, a move designed to accelerate practical deployments of high-density GPU and HPC infrastructure across India.
The partnership pairs Vertiv’s engineering and product capabilities with IIT Bombay’s academic modelling and research disciplines to address cooling, efficiency and deployment pathways for emerging accelerator-heavy workloads.
The joint programme will examine a range of approaches, from rack- and room-level liquid cooling to hybrid air-liquid systems and thermal-management controls that prioritise energy efficiency under sustained, high-power GPU loads. Coverage of the announcement frames the work as research-led and application-oriented, with practical pilot deployments and validation tests expected to follow laboratory modelling.
The collaboration is positioned to help operators, hyperscalers, and system integrators better understand trade-offs among capital cost, power density, PUE impact and operational complexity for India-scale deployments.
Vertiv’s local investments and technology footprint in India, including recent regional centres and training initiatives, provide the commercial and engineering platform for rapid prototype testing and field trials, industry coverage says. IIT Bombay brings computational fluid dynamics, thermal simulation and systems-level rigour, enabling the partnership to move beyond conceptual design into reproducible deployment blueprints that can be adopted by Indian data-centre operators and cloud customers.
Stakeholders in the sector say India’s accelerating AI adoption has created an urgent need for country-specific cooling strategies: dense GPU clusters produce sustained heatloads and typically demand liquid-assisted or close-coupled cooling to remain economical and energy-efficient.
By combining academic validation with vendor engineering, the Vertiv–IIT Bombay tie-up aims to shorten time-to-market for effective solutions and lower the risk premium associated with early liquid-cooling pilots.
The announcement has been carried widely in the Indian trade press and industry wires, demonstrating the level of market interest in collaborative, research-driven approaches to data-centre thermal management. While the partnership’s public materials do not yet specify pilot sites, timelines or funding envelopes, observers expect prototype demonstrations and technical whitepapers to emerge in the coming months as the partners move from modelling to real-world testing.
If adopted at scale, the outputs from Vertiv and IIT Bombay could materially influence how India designs and operates next-generation AI facilities, not only improving energy efficiency and performance but also lowering barriers for domestic operators to host large GPU fleets locally.
