For an engineer reading a data center brief in 2026, the first constraint is rarely the heat load. It is whether the site has the electricity, the water, and a use for the rejected heat to run a given cooling scheme at all. The cooling technology, and with it the refrigerant, follows from what the location can supply. This is not a 2026 development. The design and site-selection firm Build.inc dates the shift to around 2023, when GPU racks crossed the point at which cooling could no longer be, in its words, engineered in afterward; the assumption "broke around 2023, and it has not returned

By Sergei Mukminov, Editor-in-Chief, Refindustry The Danfoss Smart Store ADC in Nordborg. Source: Danfoss A/S. A Danish convenience store covered 100 percent of its heating demand from refrigeration waste heat through the coldest winter in more than a decade. Over two years of operation, the same site exported 36 MWh of surplus heat to its city's district network and saved close to €8,800 on heat it would otherwise have purchased from the same grid. The electricity penalty for delivering that heat was, in the operator's words, marginal.

The deadline that supermarkets faced to install new refrigeration systems running on low-GWP refrigerants was January 1, 2027. It is now January 1, 2032. On May 21, 2026, alongside President Trump in the Oval Office, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced final revisions to the 2023 Technology Transitions Rule and a proposed technical fix to the 2024 Emissions Reduction and Reclamation Rule. EPA put the combined savings at more than $2.4 billion, including over $800 million "at the supermarket." Within hours, HARDI countered with its own figure: the changes could add nearly $8 billion in r