Motivair Cool News

How Motivair Cooling Technology Enables the Schneider Electric and AMD Helios Reference Design

Schneider Electric and AMD have introduced the first jointly developed and validated reference design for the AMD Helios rackscale solution. The design gives data center operators a blueprint for deploying high-density AI environments with less complexity and risk.

It supports AI racks up to 246 kW and addresses both new greenfield AI Factories and high-density retrofits.

Motivair by Schneider Electric technology is central to the cooling architecture, with its MCDU-70 Coolant Distribution Units providing liquid cooling and ChilledDoors, rear-door heat exchangers supporting the remaining air-cooled load.

Why the design requires both liquid and air cooling

In the reference design, liquid cooling removes 84% of the heat generated by the AMD Helios AI racks. The remaining 16% must be managed through air cooling.
This creates two distinct cooling requirements:

• Deliver precise liquid cooling to the high-density AI racks
• Manage the heat that remains in the data hall

The MCDU-70 and M14 rear-door heat exchangers address these requirements as part of an integrated facility cooling architecture.

The role of the MCDU-70

The Motivair MCDU-70 is a floor-mounted, liquid-to-liquid coolant distribution unit used to cool the AMD Helios rackscale solutions.

In the greenfield design, three MCDU-70s serve each AI pod with N+1 redundancy. The units are connected to a Technology Cooling System loop optimized for efficiency and synchronized with AMD Helios infrastructure specifications.

A separate high-temperature facility water loop supplies 97°F, or 36°C, water to the MCDU-70s. The Technology Cooling System then supplies 104°F, or 40°C, water to the liquid-cooled IT equipment.

These higher water temperatures allow the facility to use adiabatic dry coolers for outdoor heat rejection across a wide range of climates. According to the reference design, this approach can help reduce energy and capital costs compared with chillers.

The architecture also includes redundant piping, UPS power for the CDUs and facility pumps, and five minutes of thermal storage at maximum cooling capacity. These elements support cooling during maintenance, equipment failure, or the time required for chillers and dry coolers to restart following a power outage.

Managing the remaining heat

The reference design provides two options for managing the portion of the heat not removed by liquid:

• Ducted hot-aisle containment connected to perimeter fan walls
• Motivair’s ChilledDoor, rear door heat exchanger

The M14 rear-door heat exchangers cool the hot air leaving each rack before returning it to the room at a predetermined setpoint. Because they manage most of the air-cooling requirements at the rack level, the greenfield configuration using M14 units requires two Uniflair FWCV fan walls to supply conditioned air to the white space. The hot-aisle containment configuration requires seven.

This gives operators two validated approaches for combining liquid and air cooling based on the needs of the data hall.

Enabling a 10.44 MW greenfield AI Factory

The greenfield design is purpose-built for two AMD Helios clusters within a single data hall. It supports:

• Up to 40 liquid-cooled AI racks at 246 kW per rack
• 22 air-cooled support racks at up to 45 kW per rack
• A total IT capacity of 10.44 MW
• Modeled annualized PUE ranging from 1.121 to 1.137 at full load, depending on location and cooling configuration

The AI racks are organized into two pods using Prefabricated Modular EcoStruxure Pod Data Center infrastructure to support power distribution, cabling, and Technology Cooling System piping.

By defining how the CDUs, piping, air cooling, outdoor heat rejection, power systems, and AI racks work together, the reference design provides a repeatable framework for building high-density AI capacity from the ground up.

A blueprint for retrofits

The design also shows how an existing data center can introduce an AMD Helios AI pod.

In the retrofit scenario, three existing 44-rack pods are replaced with one AI pod containing up to ten 246 kW liquid-cooled racks and seven air-cooled support racks. Two MCDU-70s provide N+1 liquid-cooling redundancy, while either hot-aisle containment or M14 rear-door heat exchangers manage the air-cooled load.

This configuration supports a total data center IT capacity of 6.15 MW while retaining 176 existing 20 kW racks.

Connecting AI ambition to deployment

The Schneider Electric and AMD reference design moves beyond individual components to show how a complete AI Factory can be built around the requirements of the AMD Helios platform.

Within that architecture, the MCDU-70 provides precise liquid cooling for 246 kW AI racks, while the M14 rear-door heat exchanger offers an option for managing the heat that remains in the data hall.

Together, these Motivair technologies help enable a validated cooling architecture that can scale from a high-density retrofit to a 10.44 MW greenfield AI Factory.