DarkNX Contracts Accelsius to Cool 300 MW Ontario AI Campus
- Cooling & Heat Recovery Data Centers Efficiency & Optimization News
Marin Holt
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- 5 minutes read
- DarkNX signed agreement with Accelsius to deploy NeuCool two-phase direct-to-chip cooling across a 300 MW AI data center campus in Ontario, Canada, announced November 17, 2025.
- First two facilities are each rated at 65 MW; Phase 1 targeted for 2026, Phase 2 for 2027.
- NeuCool MR250 supports up to 250 kW per rack; refrigerant has GWP of 1; zero water consumption during operation.
- Estimated build cost is $3.2M per MW; Accelsius projects 44% annual OpEx savings and 17% TCO reduction versus single-phase cooling.
- InnVesture (NASDAQ: INV), parent of Accelsius, disclosed the agreement as a material business development on November 17, 2025.
DarkNX has contracted Accelsius to deploy NeuCool two-phase direct-to-chip cooling across a planned 300 MW artificial intelligence Data Center campus in Ontario, Canada, the largest announced deployment of two-phase liquid cooling in the data center industry.
Critical Perspective
DarkNX is a newly formed entity with no operational data center facilities; the 300 MW campus in Ontario exists as an announced project without disclosed construction permits, utility interconnection agreements, or a commercial operation date. Accelsius’s NeuCool two-phase direct-to-chip cooling has been deployed at far smaller scales; this contract represents an order-of-magnitude jump to 300 MW with no publicly available performance data from comparable installations. Ontario’s electricity grid runs primarily on hydro and nuclear baseload, but a 300 MW sustained draw would represent a significant new industrial load requiring dedicated transmission capacity that has not been publicly confirmed. The contract announcement names no financial terms, construction timeline, or phasing schedule, making it impossible to assess whether this represents a binding commitment or an aspirational agreement.
What Is Being Built
The campus will comprise multiple facilities, with the first two each rated at 65 MW and targeted for operation in 2026 and 2027. NeuCool circulates a dielectric refrigerant in two phases, liquid and vapor, directly across AI processors, transferring heat without water. The system supports rack densities up to 250 kW under Accelsius’s MR250 configuration and 150 kW under the IR150, matching the thermal output of current Nvidia H100 and Blackwell GPU clusters. Johnson Controls is providing facility-level chillers.
DarkNX will pay an estimated $3.2 million per MW to build out the campus, about half the cost cited for comparable hyperscale data center real estate investment trusts. Accelsius projects 44% annual operating cost savings and a 17% total cost of ownership reduction compared with single-phase liquid cooling. The NeuCool refrigerant carries a global warming potential of one and consumes no water during operation.
Why It Matters
Data centers supporting AI workloads now routinely deploy GPU clusters exceeding 100 kW per rack, a density that conventional air cooling cannot handle reliably or economically. Two-phase liquid cooling removes heat more efficiently than single-phase water-based systems because the phase change from liquid to vapor absorbs substantially more thermal energy at constant temperature. The DarkNX campus is significant because it applies this at 300 MW scale, large enough to power roughly 250,000 homes, and sets a deployment benchmark that competing operators will face when building out AI infrastructure.
InnVesture, the NASDAQ-listed parent of Accelsius (ticker: INV), disclosed the agreement as a material business development. Accelsius introduced the NeuCool MR250 module in October 2025, increasing per-rack capacity from 150 kW to 250 kW and directly enabling the density levels required by next-generation AI chips. The Ontario campus will serve as the first full-scale commercial validation of that specification.
