PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE

JCI Cooling AI Data Centers

I suspect most of you have heard more than you care to about all the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Data Centers that are being proposed and maybe already under construction. The news tells you they use lots of energy, water and land, but if you dig just one level deeper you can find that these data centers are a big part of our former employer’s current business profile. All of those computer racks in those facilities burn up a lot of electrical power that all turns into heat which must be removed. Similarly, the device you are using to read this may have a small fan to blow its heat away, but that air cooling isn’t going to suffice for a data center that will perform multi-million AI transactions in the time it takes you to read this. Those computers are now water cooled. Just like your lawn mower or leaf blower can get by with air cooling, your car engine or delivery truck needs liquid (antifreeze) cooling and a radiator to remove their larger cooling needs. So do Data Centers.

So who makes liquid chillers and knows best how to run them most efficiently? You’re right – JCI with our York chillers. JCI has been doing this for as long as any of us have worked there, and well before JCI and York joined forces. “Chiller Plant Optimization” we used to call it, after the 1970’s energy crisis put the focus on energy efficiency. We control these chillers of all sizes from well below what data centers need, up to the largest of central plants serving the largest campuses, airports, military bases, and whole cities. And it’s not just controlling the chillers that cool the water, but all the associated equipment that distributes that water and the cooling towers that ultimately reject the heat. This was a big part of my job at JCI for at least 10+ years when about 90% of the large central plant projects JCI sold would come across my desk for analysis and engineering fine tuning so they could run through a research run simulator (by Kasim S.) to achieve that “Optimization” we claimed. I’m sure today’s AI tools can do a more sophisticated job than the math modeling of that past era. So, today’s AI processes are probably being used to run the very Data Centers in which they are operating.

This is one reason why JCI’s business volume has been growing faster lately, and the stock price has been fluctuating quite significantly, often along with the ups and downs of the latest AI news and how it affects the stock markets speculation of how AI data centers are going to expand. There are many factors that affect the stock price, but this is a fairly significant new one. Since I still own a few shares, this adds to my interest level.

Topic 2: Our website transition is progressing, but not much specific to report quite yet.

Gene