Author: Sumati Sahgal, VP, Data Centre & Secure Power, Greater India
For those building India’s next generation of data centres, cooling decisions are now far more complex. Higher-density computing, including chips such as NVIDIA’s Vera Rubin is increasing thermal loads just as operators face pressure to manage energy consumption and water use across sites.
India’s latest initiative, the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) framework, is raising the bar for data centres across the country. With the introduction of new standards, there’s a fresh spotlight on crucial factors like cooling efficiency, water usage, carbon footprint, and energy reuse. This progressive move not only emphasises sustainability but also paves the way for a greener, more efficient future in data management.
These standards are currently voluntary rather than mandatory, but that doesn’t make them irrelevant to projects specified today. By creating common ways to measure cooling and resource efficiency, the standards give operators, consultants, specifiers, and contractors a clearer framework for comparing thermal architectures.
What are India’s new data centre standards?
In February 2026, BIS codified India’s first formal standards for cloud computing, data centre performance, and ethical AI. Developed by the LITD 31 technical committee, the standards align several aspects of Indian data centre performance measurement with ISO/IEC frameworks. They remain voluntary unless the government makes them enforceable through a Quality Control Order.
For cooling teams, four performance measures deserve particular attention:
- Cooling Efficiency Ratio (CER), IS/ISO/IEC 30134-7:2023: measures cooling energy relative to IT load, providing operators with a more precise view of thermal-system efficiency.
- Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE), IS/ISO/IEC 30134-9:2022: measures annual water consumption in litres relative to IT equipment energy consumption in kWh.
- Carbon Usage Effectiveness (CUE), IS/ISO/IEC 30134-8:2022: connects data centre operation with carbon performance.
- Energy Reuse Factor (ERF), IS/ISO/IEC 30134-6:2021: provides a framework for accounting for energy that is reused rather than discarded.
The framework also includes the IS/ISO/IEC 22237 series covering areas such as power distribution and environmental control.
For data centre providers, the immediate significance is that these new BIS data centre standards offer a more consistent way to evaluate outcomes. This is important for hyperscalers, colocation providers and neocloud players comparing designs across facilities, as well as for consultants and contractors who need to translate efficiency objectives into measurable engineering requirements.
In particular, CER and WUE give the industry a stronger basis for asking whether a cooling architecture delivers efficient thermal performance without simply shifting the resource burden from electricity to water.
Why CER and WUE matter beyond another headline PUE target?
Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) remains an important measure of overall data centre efficiency. It cannot, on its own, show how efficiently the cooling system is operating or make the trade-off between energy and water use visible.
The new BIS-aligned metrics add useful details. CER focuses specifically on cooling energy related to IT load, offering operators and design teams a more targeted way to assess thermal performance. WUE measures annual water consumption in litres relative to IT equipment energy consumption in kWh.
For hyperscale and colocation projects, that distinction allows teams to assess how efficiently a design removes a given heat load and the resources it consumes in the process.
CER makes cooling performance more visible
As rack densities increase, simply adding cooling capacity isn’t enough; CER introduces a metric that focuses on the relationship between cooling energy and the IT load it supports.
For operators, consultants, and MEP contractors, this presents an opportunity to shift specifications towards measurable performance outcomes. Cooling capacity and resilience remain essential, but energy performance can become a more explicit part of design evaluation and, where appropriate, of procurement criteria.
WUE brings water into the same design conversation
An architecture that reduces electrical consumption but depends heavily on water may simply shift the resource burden rather than resolve it. This is particularly relevant in India, where data centre development is concentrated in markets with varying degrees of water stress and where water governance differs substantially by location. CER and WUE are more useful when considered together: cooling designs should be assessed for both the energy required to manage heat and the water required to support that process.
Data centre standards in India operate within a fragmented water-regulation landscape
The new BIS standards provide common performance metrics, but they do not replace India’s existing water and environmental regulations. For data centre providers operating across multiple states, the regulatory landscape is more fragmented.
Groundwater extraction for industrial and commercial projects is governed by Ministry of Jal Shakti guidelines. Water use and wastewater discharge are also covered under existing environmental legislation and State Pollution Control Board oversight. Meanwhile, environmental clearance requirements can depend on a project’s size and classification, as data centres are not treated as a standalone category under the EIA framework.
There are also substantial differences in how regions address sustainability and water. Some policies promise continuous water availability for data centre investment while imposing limited requirements on sustainable consumption; others encourage measures such as closed-loop cooling, rainwater harvesting, or the use of treated sewage water.
For a hyperscaler or a national colocation platform, this creates several operating environments rather than a single set of requirements. As a result, the voluntary BIS framework may prove useful before any mandatory requirements emerge. CER and WUE can provide a common performance vocabulary across sites with differing local permitting, water availability, and policy conditions.
Operators have an opportunity to establish consistent design and measurement criteria across their portfolios, which is particularly valuable when the same cooling architecture must perform across locations with varying water constraints.
What the standards mean for liquid-cooling specifications
The new BIS standards do not require liquid cooling. By making cooling energy and water consumption more explicit performance considerations, they strengthen the case for evaluating thermal architectures against measurable outcomes rather than just installed cooling capacity.
This approach is especially relevant as high-density racks put greater pressure on air-based systems. Schneider Electric’s liquid-cooling portfolio focuses on comprehensive direct-to-chip architectures designed to remove heat at the source, with solutions that can be integrated alongside rear door heat exchangers (RDHx), HDUs and existing air-cooling infrastructure where appropriate.
For many high-density environments, closed-loop direct-to-chip cooling deserves particular consideration. Cold plates mounted on CPUs and GPUs transfer heat into a liquid loop, with coolant distribution units (CDUs) connecting the IT-side cooling system to the broader facility thermal infrastructure. By targeting heat at its source, liquid cooling can reduce reliance on the air movement required by traditional air-only approaches.
However, the complete water impact of liquid cooling depends on the facility-side architecture and how heat is ultimately rejected. Closed-loop direct-to-chip systems are a way to minimize operational water consumption compared with evaporative alternatives, but the whole thermal chain still needs to be evaluated.
That is why a chip-to-chiller perspective is critical. Cold plates, CDUs, facility water systems, heat rejection, controls, and power infrastructure must work as an integrated system if operators want improvements in CER or WUE to translate into facility-level performance.
Four questions data centre provider teams should put into design briefs now
The standards may be voluntary, but operators, consultants, specifiers, and contractors need not wait for a regulatory mandate to incorporate their principles into project requirements.
Four questions can help make that practical:
- How will CER and WUE be measured? Define the measurement boundaries, metering requirements, and operating data needed to establish cooling energy and water performance.
- What happens to WUE under actual site conditions? Evaluate the entire thermal architecture, including heat rejection, rather than assuming that rack-side cooling technology determines overall water performance.
- Can the design accommodate higher rack densities without exceeding its efficiency targets? Consider how the cooling architecture will respond to changes in compute density, not just whether it meets the initial IT load.
- What would need to change if today’s voluntary benchmarks became future procurement or regulatory requirements? Operators should not assume that requirements will be enforced in the future, but designing for measurement and flexibility now can reduce the need to retrofit those capabilities later.
From voluntary benchmark to practical design discipline
India’s new BIS standards do not specify which cooling technology data centre operators should deploy. Their more immediate value is providing the industry with a clearer framework for measuring what efficient cooling should deliver.
For hyperscalers, colocation and neocloud providers (and the consultants, engineers and contractors supporting them), CER, WUE and related measures are useful inputs for design decisions. As India’s data centre infrastructure scales for AI workloads, cooling specifications will increasingly need to account for compute density, energy efficiency and water performance together.
Liquid cooling is an important part of that strategy, particularly in high-density environments. However, achieving the intended outcome requires looking beyond individual cooling components to the full thermal architecture.
Schneider Electric brings that chip-to-chiller perspective together across liquid cooling, power, software and services, helping data centre teams evaluate architectures in the context of site-specific density, efficiency and operational requirements.
Schneider Electric’s Liquid Cooling Hub provides more detail on comprehensive direct-to-chip architectures, including CDU and Heat Dissipation Unit (HDU) selection, as well as retrofit and greenfield planning guidance. For a closer look at how to select and design the right system for your facility, download the Liquid Cooling System Architecture Guide.
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