A water-cooled chiller over 1,000 tons quotes at 50 to 70 weeks in the United States as of May 22, 2026. An air-cooled machine over 500 tons is 40 to 60 weeks and a coolant distribution unit 30 to 50. None of those is the longest line on a datacenter schedule. The 230 kV transformer is 130 to 170 weeks and everyone knows it, so it gets a slot reservation two years out. The chiller is the item that still gets bought the old way, as part of a mechanical subcontract awarded after the guaranteed maximum price, which puts a 60-week machine on a schedule that has 40 weeks left. That is why the Open Factory Lead-Time Monitor treats chillers as the cooling pillar’s headline class and why this piece exists.
The Monitor’s input for the whole HVAC industry says the same thing the consultants’ tracker says about chillers. Census M3 puts unfilled orders at $18.6 billion for NAICS 3334 in July 2026, 2.7 months of shipments, against 1.6 months through 2015 to 2019. This piece covers the lead-time table for every class that cools a hall, seven quarters of backlog at Trane, Carrier and Johnson Controls, the order growth behind it, the component shortage under it, what liquid cooling does to the mechanical share of a build, what the R-454B summer did to refrigerant prices, and how to buy the machine 18 months before you need it.
Source: Open Factory Lead-Time Monitor (compiled from Census M3 NAICS 3334; as of July 2026)
The ratio peaked at 3.1 months in July 2022, fell to 2.3 in January 2025 as the residential cycle turned down, and has climbed back to 2.7 by July 2026 with unfilled orders up $4.6 billion, or 33%, in 18 months.
The Lead-Time Table, Cooling Rows
Every class of equipment that rejects heat from a datacenter hall now quotes at 30 weeks or more, and the two chiller classes sit at 40 to 70. Origin Partners, a power and datacenter transaction advisor, publishes a quarterly equipment tracker; its Q2 2026 edition (updated May 22, 2026) is the only public source we found that quotes chillers and CDUs by tonnage class alongside transformers and switchgear. The Monitor cites it as theirs. Our own compiled series for cooling is the Census M3 ratio above, plus the OEM backlogs and PPI further down; a contributed panel of MEP quotes is the v1 layer and does not exist yet.
Source: Origin Partners, Equipment Lead Times Tracker Q2 2026, May 2026
Water-cooled chillers over 1,000 tons quote at 50 to 70 weeks, air-cooled over 500 tons at 40 to 60, CDUs at 30 to 50, against 26 to 40 weeks for a 1.5 to 3 MW diesel standby set and 80 to 110 for metal-clad switchgear. The tracker’s own gloss on the cooling rows: “The shift to direct liquid cooling for high-density AI loads is producing a parallel supply chain story on CDUs and dry coolers that did not exist 18 months ago.”
Two OEM disclosures bracket those numbers from the supply side. Vertiv’s 10-K for 2025 reports a $15.0 billion backlog against $7.2 billion a year earlier and says the majority “is expected to be shipped within the next 12 to 18 months,” which is 52 to 78 weeks and matches the tracker’s upper rows. Munters, whose Data Center Technologies unit had about SEK 6 billion of sales and 1,000 staff in 2025, published five large orders between November 2025 and April 2026 with delivery windows in each release.
| Order | Announced | Scope | Customer | Deliveries |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 82 MUSD chillers | Dec 2, 2025 | Geoclima Circlemiser chillers, service, commissioning | US colo, hyperscale AI tenant | mid Q2 2026 to end Q3 2026 |
| 840 MSEK chillers | Dec 11, 2025 | Circlemiser chillers, from the Virginia plant | New US colo customer | Q4 2026 to Q1 2027 |
| 215 MUSD CRAHs | Nov 2025 | Custom over-the-rack CRAHs, platform-wide | US hyperscaler | end 2026 to early 2028 |
| 2.1 BSEK CRAHs, CDUs, chillers | Dec 2025 | Chilled-water CRAHs, CDUs, Circlemiser chillers, start-up | US colo | Q4 2026 to Q1 2028 |
| 2.0 BSEK CDUs and CRAHs | Apr 24, 2026 | High-capacity CDUs and over-the-rack CRAHs for an AI factory | US colo | early 2027 to Q1 2028 |
Munters’ five largest data center orders deliver into Q1 2028. Source: Munters Group press releases via Cision, November 2025 to April 2026. Data: 08-munters-delivery-windows.csv
The 2.1 BSEK order for CRAHs, CDUs and chillers “begin[s] in Q4 2026 and continue[s] through Q1 2028”; the 2.0 BSEK CDU and CRAH order booked in April 2026 starts “in early 2027” and runs to Q1 2028; the 840 MSEK chiller order of December 2025 delivers Q4 2026 to Q1 2027. A colocation buyer who signed in December 2025 is taking chillers 10 to 15 months later. That is the 60-week problem stated as a calendar.
Seven Quarters of Backlog at Trane, Carrier and JCI
Trane Technologies added $4.3 billion of backlog in the first half of 2026, four times the $1.05 billion it added in all of 2025. We read the 8-K earnings exhibits for Trane, Carrier and Johnson Controls from Q4 2024 through Q2 2026 and built the series in the Open Factory Book-to-Bill League Table. Trane’s enterprise backlog was $6.75 billion at the end of 2024, $7.8 billion at the end of 2025, $10.7 billion at March 31, 2026 and a record $12.1 billion at June 30, 2026, up 70% year over year, with Americas Commercial HVAC backlog up 90%.
Source: Open Factory Book-to-Bill League Table (compiled from Trane Technologies, Johnson Controls and Vertiv 8-K and 10-K filings; as of July 2026)
Trane went from $7.8 billion to $12.1 billion between December 2025 and June 2026, Johnson Controls from $14.9 billion to $21.0 billion between September 2025 and June 2026, and Vertiv from $7.2 billion to $15.0 billion between the two year-ends. Two caveats sit inside the chart. JCI restated its backlog from fiscal Q1 2026 to include equipment-only sales for longer-cycle projects, so the jump from $14.9 billion to $18.2 billion between September and December 2025 is partly a definition change; the organic growth rates it reports (+20%, +26%, +32% in fiscal Q3 2026) are the cleaner read. And Carrier does not publish a backlog in dollars at all, which is why it is missing from the chart and why it scores low on that line of the Open Factory OEM Disclosure Scorecard.
The composition matters more than the total. On the Q2 2026 call, Trane’s management said the backlog is “almost 95% for commercial HVAC” and that “we have about $6 billion of the backlog, that’s for 2027.” Half of Trane’s order book is already spoken for in the year after next. An analyst on the same call framed the arithmetic: the backlog is roughly half of a year’s revenue and is attributable mostly to applied equipment, which is 15 to 20% of revenue. Applied equipment is the trade term for the chillers, air handlers and CDUs that a datacenter buys.
Carrier’s language is the same without the dollars. Q4 2025 Commercial HVAC orders were “up nearly 50% driven by key data center wins”; in Q1 2026 data center orders were “up over 500%” and “backlog fully covers expected 2026 data center sales”; in Q2 2026 total orders were up about 40%, Commercial HVAC about 65% and data centers more than 300%, with 2026 sales guided to about $23 billion. Carrier told investors in February 2025 it expected $1 billion of data center sales in 2025, which against $21.7 billion of 2025 net sales is 4.6% of the company. A vertical that is 5% of revenue is moving a $22 billion company’s order book.
Data Center Orders Grew 100% to 500% a Quarter
The order growth rates the OEMs disclose for data center and applied equipment have run between 37% and 500% for five consecutive quarters, and the fastest growers are the smallest bases. Trane reported applied equipment bookings up over 60% in Q2 2025, over 100% in Q3, more than 120% in Q4 2025 with an applied book-to-bill of 200%, more than 160% in Q1 2026 and 130% in Q2 2026. Regnery’s summary on the Q2 call: “On a 2-year stack, applied bookings are up more than 4x.”
Source: Open Factory Book-to-Bill League Table
Trane’s applied bookings grew 60%, 100%, 120%, 160% and 130% in the five quarters to June 2026; Carrier’s data center orders grew more than 500% and 300% in the first two quarters of 2026; JCI’s Building Solutions North America orders grew 56%, 40% and 37% organically, each release attributing the growth to data centers; and Munters’ Data Center Technologies order intake grew 416% in Q4 2025, taking the group’s 2025 book-to-bill to 1.6x and its backlog up 53%.
Modine is the purest read because it now reports data centers as a segment. Data Centers sales were $348.6 million in the quarter to June 30, 2026, up 90%, 40% of a $874 million company, after 158% growth in the March 2026 quarter. Its CEO reported “three consecutive quarters of record order intake leading to our backlog nearly doubling over the past year.” Vertiv’s 2025 backlog doubled. Munters’ DCT unit is 40% of the group. The buyers who will be told “60 weeks” this year are competing with these order books, not with the plant down the road.
Components Are the Second Bottleneck
Two chiller and CRAH makers have now told the SEC or their shareholders that components, not factory floor space, are what limits output. Modine’s 10-K for the year to March 2026 is the plainest: “demand for certain key components is currently outpacing supplier capacity. We began experiencing supply shortages in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2026. These component shortages are negatively impacting our production schedules and are tempering our planned production ramp-up for certain data center products.” The Data Centers segment’s gross margin fell 960 basis points to 20.2% in the June 2026 quarter, which the company attributed to capacity expansion costs plus “production inefficiencies due to supply chain constraints.”
Munters said the same thing three months later. Its Q2 2026 report (July 17, 2026) records group order intake up 137% and DCT sales down, because “the production ramp-up and supply chain constraints impacted throughput,” with “delays in component deliveries” named alongside tariffs, and the mitigation is the usual one: “qualifying additional suppliers, increasing inventory of critical components.” Its US chiller plant in Virginia was to be operational by the end of Q1 2026 and was still described as ramping in July.
Trane, with the largest applied footprint, is the calmest voice and still concedes the point. Asked about suppliers on the Q2 2026 call, Regnery said: “are we seeing constraints? Yes, but we always do. Are we seeing a bit more than normal? Maybe a bit more normal, but nothing that our team can’t manage.” The company says it has expanded applied capacity four times over the last three years, is investing in Grand Rapids, and is “not turning away orders.” A buyer should read those three statements together: the assembler with the most capacity is the one saying supplier constraints are “a bit more than normal,” and the two smaller assemblers are saying their throughput is already limited by parts. Neither filing names the parts. Whatever they are, a chiller buyer cannot second-source them on the buyer’s own schedule, which is the argument for buying the machine, not the subcontract, early. The Open Factory Lead-Time Monitor tracks the OEM statements quarter by quarter on its cooling page.
Mechanical Is 33% of a Liquid-Cooled Build
Liquid cooling moves 11 points of a datacenter’s construction budget out of shell and electrical and into mechanical, so the 60-week item is also a bigger share of the money. Turner & Townsend’s 2025 Data Centre Construction Cost Index gives an indicative US cost allocation: mechanical including equipment is 22% of an air-cooled build and 33% of a liquid-cooled one; electrical falls from 54% to 48%; core, shell and architectural from 14% to 9%; general conditions stay at 10%. The same report puts the liquid-cooled premium at 7 to 10% for similar IT capacity and prices Phoenix and Columbus at $9.8 per watt, Atlanta at $9.9, Silicon Valley at $13.3 and Tokyo at $15.2.
Source: Open Factory Datacenter MEP Cost Table (compiled from Turner & Townsend Data Centre Construction Cost Index 2025; as of 2025)
Mechanical is 22% of an air-cooled US build and 33% of a liquid-cooled one, electrical 54% and 48%, shell 14% and 9%. At Phoenix’s $9.8 per watt that is $2.2 million per MW of mechanical for air and $3.2 million per MW for liquid, or $43 million against $65 million for a 20 MW hall before the 7 to 10% premium; the Datacenter MEP Cost Table carries each line with the Monitor’s lead time beside it and the carrying cost of a month’s slip.
The price of the equipment inside that share has not stood still either. The BLS producer price index for air conditioning and refrigeration equipment is 62% above January 2020 as of July 2026 and 4.6% above July 2025.
Source: BLS PPI WPU1148 via Open Factory Lead-Time Monitor
The index rose 40% between January 2020 and July 2022, drifted for two years, and added another 9% from January 2025 to July 2026. A chiller quote from 2021 is not a reference for anything; the Quote Check tool applies the PPI path and the published lead time to a spec so the buyer sees both bands before opening a bid.
R-454B’s Summer
The refrigerant transition added a second supply shock to chillers in 2025, and the May 2026 rule change that eased it for houses left the chiller limit untouched. EPA’s Technology Transitions rule of October 2023 (88 FR 73098) restricts HFCs with a GWP of 700 or more “for chillers–comfort cooling beginning January 1, 2025,” for “all compressor types,” and sets the same 700 limit for datacenter and computer-room cooling equipment from 2027 and for industrial process chillers from January 1, 2026 or later by temperature. Residential and light commercial AC hit the same 700 limit on the same day, and that is where the trouble started: the field moved to R-454B all at once.
Source: ACHR News (March 2025), Aristotle Air (July 2025), ACiQ (September 2025); redrawn by Open Factory
A 20 lb cylinder that cost $345 in 2021 listed at $310 from a Virginia supply house’s regular distributor in March 2025 with a six-week wait, against $730 on the spot market the same week, and traded at $700 to $2,000 through the summer with regional jumps from $485 to $1,050 “in weeks”; all of these are single reported quotes, not a distribution, and the piece says so.
The mechanism was cylinders, not molecules. Chemours told ACHR News in March 2025 that it had “lead times of approximately 10 weeks for new orders” and that “the primary issue with R-454B packaged product for the aftermarket is A2L cylinder availability.” At ACCA’s June 18, 2025 panel, Worthington said the industry had “probably 10x’ed them, 5x’ed them” on forecasts, “one entire batch failed testing and couldn’t be used,” Honeywell had raised blending and down-packing capacity 44% and Arkema had entered the market in mid-May. By October 13, 2025 HARDI’s Alex Ayers told the same outlet “the crisis is over,” with availability restored in late August and September and prices “still elevated” but falling month over month. Lennox said in January 2026 that the 40% of its 2025 residential mix still on R-410A “is gone, and it’s all going to be R-454B” in 2026.
| Date | Instrument | What it did |
|---|---|---|
| Oct 24, 2023 | Technology Transitions final rule, 88 FR 73098 | Comfort-cooling chillers: GWP 700 limit from Jan 1, 2025, all compressor types; datacenter and computer-room cooling: GWP 700 from 2027; IPR chillers from Jan 1, 2026 or later |
| Dec 26, 2023 | Interim final rule | Residential and light commercial AC install deadline extended to Jan 1, 2026 for pre-2025 components |
| Jan 1, 2025 | Compliance date | New comfort-cooling chillers and residential AC must use refrigerants under 700 GWP; R-454B (465) and R-32 (675) become the volume products |
| Mar to Sep 2025 | R-454B cylinder shortage | Lead times to 10 weeks at Chemours, cylinders $700 to $2,000, demand 5 to 10x forecasts, one cylinder batch failed test |
| Oct 3, 2025 | Proposed reconsideration, 90 FR 47999 | EPA proposes to revisit compliance dates and limits across subsectors |
| Oct 13, 2025 | HARDI: “the crisis is over” | Availability restored late August to September; prices elevated but falling month over month |
| Nov 20, 2025 | CY2026 allowance allocations, 90 FR 52391 | 2026 HFC allowances issued at the 60% step |
| May 26, 2026 | Final reconsideration, 91 FR 31284, effective Jul 27, 2026 | Install deadline removed for pre-2025 residential systems; IPR and semiconductor chiller dates to Jan 1, 2030; supermarket and cold-storage limits raised until 2032. Comfort-cooling chiller limit unchanged. |
The refrigerant rule changed four times in 31 months; the chiller limit never moved. Source: Federal Register (88 FR 73098, 90 FR 47999, 90 FR 52391, 91 FR 31284); ACHR News; ACCA. Data: 11-aim-act-timeline.csv
The final reconsideration of May 26, 2026 (91 FR 31284, effective July 27, 2026) removed the installation deadline for pre-2025 residential and light commercial systems, pushed industrial process and semiconductor chillers to January 1, 2030, and raised supermarket and cold storage limits to 1,400 and 700 until 2032; it changed nothing for comfort-cooling chillers, which have been at 700 GWP since January 1, 2025. For a plant or datacenter chiller that means R-1234ze or R-513A on centrifugals and screws, or R-454B and R-32 on smaller machines, and it means A2L machinery-room ventilation, leak detection and technician certification that never appear on the equipment quote. The R-454B Summer runs the pass-through into chiller pricing line by line; the point for this piece is that the OEM ramping a new refrigerant platform in 2025 was also the OEM whose order book doubled, and the Cooling Roadmap tracks which platforms have shipped on which refrigerant.
Buying the Chiller 18 Months Out
The hyperscalers already buy chillers the way utilities buy transformers: owner-furnished, slot-reserved, sometimes with a deposit on the factory itself, and the lead-time table says every 20 MW developer now has to copy them. Owner-furnished, contractor-installed procurement moves the chiller purchase order from the mechanical subcontract to the owner’s own desk at basis of design, which is the only point on a schedule that is 70 weeks before mechanical completion. The trade’s rule of thumb is that it saves roughly 15% of contractor markup on the equipment and costs up to 6% in installer productivity on unfamiliar gear; those are a recruiter’s practitioner estimates, not a measured distribution, and OFCI vs Design-Build works through what a colocation developer can and cannot copy from the hyperscaler playbook.
The far end of that playbook is the capacity reservation. Modine’s 10-K discloses that in March 2026 it “entered into a long-term capacity agreement with one of its strategic data center customers” and “received a $165 million up-front deposit from the customer to support investments necessary to meet the planned sales volume,” expecting “to sell more than $4 billion of data center cooling products to this customer during calendar years 2027 through 2029.” One buyer has reserved three years of a chiller and CRAH maker’s expansion before the expansion is finished. The $60 Million Deposit covers how the same instrument spread from transformers and turbines to cooling; the Modine deposit is the largest one disclosed in cooling so far.
Between the mechanical subcontract and the $165 million deposit there is a middle path, and it is what to do Monday. First, price the schedule, not the machine: run the hall through the Lead-Time-Adjusted Schedule with the Monitor’s published 50 to 70 weeks for water-cooled chillers and 30 to 50 for CDUs, and if the chiller purchase order is not dated before the civil permit, the energization month is wrong. Second, issue the chiller and CDU purchase orders as owner-furnished at basis of design, with a named factory slot week and liquidated damages at 0.5% a week written against that slot, not against a vague “ship date.” Third, write UQD compliance and a second CDU source into the spec, because the CDU is the one class on the table where a second qualified vendor exists at 30 to 50 weeks. Fourth, put the refrigerant on the face of the purchase order (R-1234ze, R-513A or R-454B), with the A2L room ventilation and detection scoped to the mechanical contractor, and run the landed cost of an imported machine through the Tariff Exposure Calculator before choosing a European or Asian line. Fifth, ask each OEM in the RFQ for its backlog and next open slot in writing, following the RFQ template for capital equipment, and grade the answers against the OEM Disclosure Scorecard: Trane and JCI publish a backlog, Carrier does not, and the one that will not tell its shareholders will not tell you.
Behind the paywall: the OEM-by-OEM table of where 2027 chiller capacity actually opens and why, from seven quarters of filings and calls, and the week-by-week OFCI calendar for a 20 MW hall that puts the chiller purchase order 78 weeks before mechanical completion, both built on the Open Factory Lead-Time Monitor and the Datacenter MEP Cost Table.