Liquid Cooling: What does Google‘s Brazos mean for the broader CDU ecosystem?: U.S. Multi Industry & Electrical Equipment

Research evidence excerpt

Liquid Cooling: What does Google‘s Brazos mean for the broader CDU ecosystem?: U.S. Multi Industry & Electrical Equipment

17 June 2026

U.S. Multi Industry & Electrical Equipment

Liquid Cooling: What does Google's Brazos mean for the broader

CDU ecosystem?

Google recently released early specifications for a liquid-to-air (L2A) CDU named “Brazos”. Varun Govindaraj

+1 917 344 8543 Like project “Deschutes” that came before it in 2025, Brazos simply announces a CDU

varun.govindaraj@bernsteinsg.com reference design for the Open Compute Project’s vendor ecosystem (which counts Vertiv,

nVent, and Boyd as members) to produce. It is not a competing product to Vertiv/Boyd/

Chad Dillard nVent/Motivair’s existing L2A CDU lines that Google will manufacture; hyperscalers

+1 917 344 8469

chad.dillard@bernsteinsg.com are not in the business of making this equipment.

Prima facie, the specifications on Brazos-class CDUs seem relatively low. At 60kW of Alasdair Leslie

+44 20 7762 4952 cooling capacity, it cannot even cool one Blackwell rack (which requires ~120kW of cooling

alasdair.leslie@bernsteinsg.com capacity). Interestingly, Brazos-class CDUs are designed to draw DC power (vs. many other

L2A CDUs that are designed for AC power instead).

Madison Rezaei

+1 917 344 8622

madison.rezaei@bernsteinsg.com We believe these CDUs are designed to be OCP compliant, and fit into legacy hyperscaler

deployments which tend to have DC power infrastructure already. The cooling capacity

Specialist Sales of 60kW does not work well for frontier training models, but can support inference at that

range. Given concerns around how quickly data center capacity can get up and running,

Steve Song creating an inference ecosystem that can run in existing facilities with simple L2A CDU +1 917 344 8401