All but two of the world's ten largest PFAS producers plan to expand output, and most of them name the same reason: AI. A review by the campaign group ChemSec found expansion plans at plants in Europe, Asia and North America, tied to two uses — cooling the next generation of data centers and manufacturing semiconductors. The plans land while Europe, the UK and several US states are trying to restrict the same class of chemicals, which do not break down in nature and have been detected in the blood of more than 99% of people worldwide.
Daikin of Japan has announced a dedicated hub for data centers to meet the demand, and said it intends to hold and grow its market share by selling more of its existing fluorinated products and bringing out new ones. Arkema, the French multinational, is widening its refrigerant range and building a $60 million (£44 million) production unit in Kentucky that the company says will let it answer the fast-growing cooling needs of data centers. Chemours, the American producer, is expanding to serve demand from what it calls advanced data centers and AI equipment, and says its liquid cooling solutions cut what data centers spend on energy, water, space, maintenance and capital.
Critics say Chemours understates both the toxicity of PFAS and their climate impact. The company was recently ordered to pay $450 million to settle a lawsuit over PFAS discharges.
The rest of the expanding group spans four continents: AGC of Japan, the Chinese conglomerate Dongyue, the Indian chemicals giant Gujarat Fluorochemicals, the privately held Russian producer HaloPolymer, Mexico's Orbia Fluor & Energy Materials, the American fluorinated-gas maker Solstice, and Belgium's Syensqo.
Producers also name coatings and binders for lithium-ion batteries — the kind used in electric cars, laptops and phones — as a growth area. Gujarat Fluorochemicals chief executive Bir Kapoor recently called batteries one of several sunrise sectors, alongside data centers, semiconductors and green hydrogen, and said the market offers large room for growth.
Two companies broke from the pattern. Switzerland's Archroma is moving toward promoting PFAS-free alternatives, and Germany's BASF has said it will exit PFAS production by 2028.
The data center application is specific. In two-phase immersion cooling, servers are submerged in a tank of PFAS with a low boiling point. As the hardware heats, the fluid boils and carries heat away as vapor; the vapor rises to a water-cooled condenser at the top of the tank, returns to liquid and cycles again. The system is marketed as more sparing of water and energy than what it replaces.
Chip manufacturing is the second demand channel, and by one account a deeper one. A recent investor note from Danske Bank described these forever chemicals as necessary components rather than minor additives, present in as many as 1,000 separate steps at the nanoscale. The bank's analysts called PFAS a potential hidden risk of the AI boom, with cleanup and litigation costs that could run to billions of euros.
That estimate is the number worth holding beside the others in this story. Chemours has just been ordered to pay $450 million over discharges: one company, one settlement, for chemistry already in the ground. Danske Bank is describing a liability measured in billions of euros for chemistry that has not been manufactured yet. Arkema's Kentucky plant costs $60 million. On the analysts' own arithmetic, the expansion being announced this year is cheap to build and expensive to finish, and no one in the announcements says whose balance sheet carries the second number.
The framing is the part I find hardest to take at face value. A fluid that persists indefinitely in air, water and soil is being sold as the sustainable option because the tank it sits in uses less water than a chiller. That is a real efficiency claim and a very narrow one. It measures the resource the data center pays for and ignores the one it does not.
Notably absent from all of this: a buyer. Every account of surging demand here comes from the companies selling into it. No hyperscaler, no colocation operator, no chipmaker appears by name. Nor does a volume — ChemSec's review reports intentions to expand, not tonnages, and no one has said how much PFAS a two-phase immersion facility holds, loses or vents per year. Demand described entirely by suppliers is a forecast, not a fact, and the difference matters when the forecast is being used as the argument against regulating the substance.
The chemistry behind the persistence is not in dispute. The carbon-fluorine bonds in per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances are among the strongest in organic chemistry, which is what makes them resistant to heat, water and corrosion — useful in industry, and almost indestructible once released. They keep moving between natural systems, accumulating in air, water and soil, then climbing the food chain. PFAS have existed for less than a century, and scientists warn their accumulation has already crossed a planetary boundary. They are thought to have contaminated the blood of nearly every living person, and studies link them to cancer, liver and kidney disease, elevated cholesterol and birth defects.
ChemSec responded with a piece of theater that is also a decent argument. It mailed finger-prick blood tests to the chief executives of every European company in its top ten, inviting them to measure the PFAS in their own blood and publish the results. Executive director Anne-Sofie Bäckar said the people running these companies should understand that the toxins they produce reach them too, and that without a rapid phase-out — one governments and regulators will have to demand — the world faces a new wave of forever chemicals.
Restriction efforts in Europe, the UK and several US states now face a producer argument they did not face before: the data centers need this. It is a harder claim to legislate against than any defense of a consumer product, and it does not come from the chemical industry alone. On ChemSec's own count, eight of the ten largest producers have already decided how that fight ends. Blood tests mailed to European chief executives will not move them. A regulator prepared to tell an AI buildout that its cooling fluid is unavailable might — and nothing in this year's expansion plans suggests these companies expect to meet one.