A rack of AI accelerators training a model throws off more heat than a row of industrial furnaces. In a Hyderabad summer, when the outside air is pushing past 40 degrees, conventional air cooling is fighting physics — and India is building AI data centres at a pace it has never seen before. Refroid Technologies, a Hyderabad startup, believes the answer is to stop cooling with air altogether.
Founded in 2021 and led by CEO Satya Bhavaraju and CTO Srikanth Kanduri, Refroid describes itself as India’s first end-to-end liquid cooling solutions company. It builds the hardware that moves heat out of the data centre at the speed AI demands: coolant distribution units for direct-to-chip cooling, single-phase immersion cooling pods, and hybrid load banks for commissioning — a full stack designed and manufactured in India for hyperscale facilities, edge computing and high-performance computing environments.
The centrepiece is the SentraFlo Series: India’s first indigenously developed liquid-to-liquid coolant distribution unit for direct-to-chip liquid cooling, unveiled in May 2025. It is an entire cooling ecosystem — CDUs with capacities configurable from 200 kW to 2 MW, rack manifolds, and a secondary fluid network plumbing architecture. The engineering detail is striking: reinforcement-learning-driven optimisation of Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), automatic coolant profiling, dew-point control to eliminate false leakage alarms, 25-micron secondary-fluid filtration, hot-swappable sensors with redundant motors and controllers, a 10-inch HMI panel, and support for SNMP, TCP/IP and BACnet protocols — built for autonomous or dark data centre operations. SentraFlo systems began shipping in June 2025.
Alongside direct-to-chip systems, Refroid builds the EcoPod line of modular single-phase immersion cooling pods, plus the MiniPod and ISOPod — tanks where servers are submerged in dielectric fluid so heat dissipates directly into the liquid. The company says its immersion systems push PUE below 1.05, and that liquid cooling can bring down a data centre’s carbon emissions by over 40% and its operating costs by up to 40%.
Commissioning is the unglamorous half of the story, and Refroid attacked it early: in March 2025 it launched India’s first hybrid load bank for direct-contact liquid cooling data centres, simulating 135 kW racks so operators can validate cooling and power infrastructure before a single rupee of live IT hardware is installed. It later paired that capability with Technavious Solutions, whose engineering teams bring Refroid’s hardware through a rigorous Level 1–7 commissioning lifecycle aligned to TIA-942 — the auditability layer hyperscalers and enterprises insist on.
What makes the story distinctly Indian is the coolant itself. In February 2025, Bharat Petroleum partnered with Refroid to develop India’s first indigenous liquid coolant for AI-powered data centres — a domestic dielectric fluid for a domestic cooling stack. Refroid has since tied up with TierX Datacenters on a sovereign AI infrastructure stack of modular, liquid-cooled DLC blocks, and says it is working with MeitY and IndiaAI to promote liquid-cooling adoption across the country’s AI buildout.
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The industry is noticing. In April 2026, MarketsandMarkets’ 360Quadrants assessment named Refroid an Emerging Leader in the data center liquid cooling market, citing its gains in energy efficiency and carbon reduction. The Financial Express reported the same month that Refroid was in discussions with hyperscalers, as supply constraints at established vendors pushed clients to look for alternatives. The context is a boom: MeitY figures put India’s installed data centre capacity at roughly 1,500 MW in 2025, up from about 375 MW in 2020 — and Bhavaraju notes that at least 75% of new ramp-up is AI-driven. In October 2026, Inc42 picked Refroid among its five manufacturing startups to watch.
Every megawatt of AI compute India deploys will need somewhere for its heat to go. Refroid’s bet is that the plumbing of that future — the pumps, manifolds, fluids and control logic — can be engineered at home, tuned for tropical ambient conditions, and exported to the world. In the age of AI, the coldest engineering might just be the hottest business.
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