A 500,000-square-foot manufacturing plant has opened in Dayton, Minnesota, backed by roughly $60 million in investment from Gradian Thermal Solutions, a company that builds cooling systems for the data centers powering the artificial intelligence boom. Production at the site actually started back in June, and the company says it has spent the months since ramping up capacity rather than just flipping a switch.
From 150 Workers to a Companywide Push for 1,000
According to a company announcement distributed via PR Newswire, the Dayton expansion pushes Gradian's total manufacturing footprint to approximately 780,000 square feet across its facilities. The company expects the investment to significantly expand its manufacturing capacity for data-center, industrial and commercial customers, and it says it anticipates growing its workforce from around 150 employees today to roughly 1,000 companywide. As StreetInsider reported alongside the announcement, the new facility includes assembly lines, fabrication equipment and an end-of-line testing lab dedicated to Gradian's chiller product line.
The company is currently hiring across engineering, project management, accounting, production, fabrication and assembly roles at the Dayton site, per the same announcement. Gradian says it chose Dayton because the location offered the space it needed along with proximity to its Maple Grove headquarters and access to the area's workforce.
A Deliberate Bet on Mission-Critical Cooling
“The Dayton expansion is a deliberate investment in our ability to meet the growing demands of mission-critical thermal management applications,” said Jason Ulett, Gradian's chief operating officer, in the announcement. Ulett also described the company's operating model as vertically integrated, with dedicated assembly and testing capabilities built to support quality, performance and scalability. Gradian offers a portfolio spanning liquid cooling, air handling, chiller and integrated modular HVAC systems, and the company says it plans to keep expanding across North America.
Gradian Thermal Solutions itself is a relatively new name in the industry. The brand launched before August 2026 as the unified parent for MAS HVAC, Daedex, DeepCoolAI and Ecochillers, according to a separate PR Newswire release announcing that rollup. John Schneider serves as Gradian's chief executive officer, and Ecochillers — a family-founded industrial HVAC and process-cooling manufacturer dating back to 1995, headquartered in Jalisco, Mexico, with operations in San Antonio and Laredo, Texas — continues operating from those same facilities as part of the broader Gradian platform.
Why Cooling Capacity Is Suddenly a Hot Commodity
The timing lines up with a broader surge in demand tied to AI computing. As Contracting Business has noted, demand for liquid cooling and advanced thermal management is accelerating as AI computing and high-density data centers require increasingly sophisticated cooling technologies. The scale of that buildout is staggering: a McKinsey & Co. analysis cited by Enterprise Minnesota estimates that $6.7 trillion in worldwide data-center investment will be needed by 2030, with 70% of that computing power tied to AI applications. Enterprise Minnesota also points out that managing the heat those computers generate continuously requires massive HVAC systems — which is essentially the business Gradian is now scaling up to serve.
Minnesota manufacturers beyond Gradian are feeling the same pull. Enterprise Minnesota reports that Rolls-Royce Solutions has invested $24 million to double production at its Mankato plant, which makes generator sets widely used in data centers, while States Manufacturing received $2.8 million in state financing from the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development to expand its own facilities in Dayton and Champlin for power-distribution equipment production. Enterprise Minnesota frames the trend as evidence that data-center construction is expanding rapidly across the Midwest, opening new markets for the state's manufacturers.
