NVIDIA and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Explore Collaboration on Next-Generation AI Data Centers

NVIDIA is in preliminary discussions with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) to integrate the Japanese industrial conglomerate’s advanced cooling systems and energy management technologies into its next-generation AI data centers, according to a report from Nikkei on Monday. The potential partnership underscores a broader industry shift toward treating data centers as holistic, factory-like infrastructure rather than simple server clusters.

NVIDIA has positioned its upcoming AI data centers as “artificial intelligence factories,” designed to operate at massive scale with unprecedented power density. The company plans to build these facilities alongside global partners, moving beyond chip supply to full infrastructure orchestration. MHI, meanwhile, has been developing its own next-generation AI-focused data center design, branded “DIAVAULT,” and has been actively testing liquid cooling systems tailored for high-performance AI workloads.

The collaboration would combine MHI’s expertise in thermal management and power efficiency with NVIDIA’s GPU-accelerated computing architecture, aiming to address one of the most pressing challenges in the AI industry: the soaring energy and cooling demands of large-scale model training and inference. Liquid cooling, in particular, has become a critical technology as chip power consumption continues to rise, with traditional air cooling proving insufficient for densely packed GPU clusters.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has previously stated that the fundamental unit of computing in the future will be the data center, emphasizing that the company builds and optimizes its systems with a “data center as a product” approach, even though it does not sell complete data centers directly. In September 2025, NVIDIA announced a landmark $100 billion investment agreement with OpenAI to build AI infrastructure powered by NVIDIA chips, while assuring other customers that such exclusive deals would not affect their supply.

The potential tie-up with MHI signals NVIDIA’s deepening commitment to end-to-end data center innovation, moving beyond chip design into the physical and mechanical engineering layers that determine real-world performance and sustainability. For MHI, the partnership would offer a direct channel into the world’s most influential AI hardware ecosystem, positioning its cooling and energy solutions at the heart of next-generation compute infrastructure.