Project Deschutes

Overview

Project Deschutes is an OCP-contributed specification for a data center Coolant Distribution Unit (CDU), developed by Google and donated to the Open Compute Project. The specification, named after the Deschutes River in Oregon, encodes over ten years of Google's liquid cooling engineering experience into an openly downloadable set of design files and guidelines.

The 0.8 specification includes the Redmond Hot Aisle Containment design for high-density liquid-cooled racks and is accompanied by full design collateral (mechanical drawings, BOM guidance, and operational parameters) downloadable from the OCP portal. By October 2025, at least four vendors had physical Project Deschutes CDU demonstrations on the OCP 2025 show floor, and at least five companies had published marketplace implementations.

Project Deschutes is a key enabler of the Fungible Data Center vision, providing a standardized cooling interface that allows different accelerator types to be deployed interchangeably in liquid-cooled rack environments.