District cooling is the cooling equivalent of district heating. Working on principles broadly similar to district heating, district cooling delivers chilled water to buildings like offices and factories. In winter, the source for cooling can often be seawater, so it is a cheaper resource than electricity to run compressors for cooling. Alternatively, district cooling can be provided by a Heat Sharing Network which enables each building on the circuit to use a heat pump to redirect heat to an ambient ground temperature circuit.

There are also 5th generation district heating and cooling systems (so called cold district heating networks) that are able to provide both heating and cooling simultaneously. In these systems the waste heat from chillers can be recycled and used for space heating or hot water production.

In September 2004, Enwave Energy Corporation, a district energy company based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, started operating a system that uses water from Lake Ontario to cool downtown buildings, including office towers, the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, a small brewery and a telecommunications centre. The process has become known as Deep Lake Water Cooling (DLWC). It will provide for over 40,000 tons (140 MW) of cooling—a significantly larger system than has been installed elsewhere. Another feature of the Enwave system is that it is integrated with Toronto's drinking water supply. The Toronto drinking water supply required a new intake location that would be further from shore and deeper in the lake. This posed two problems for the utility that managed the city's drinking water supply:

1. The capital cost of moving the water intake location.

2. The new location would supply water that was so cold it would require heating before it could be distributed.

The cooperation of the district cooling agency, Enwave, solved both problems: Enwave paid for the cost of moving the water intake and also supplied the heat to warm the drinking water supply to acceptable levels by effectively extracting the heat from the buildings it served. Contact between drinking water and the Enwave cooling system is restricted to thermal contact in a heat exchanger. Drinking water does not circulate through the Enwave cooling systems. ^{[citation needed]}

The "Cold Network of Paris" has existed in the city since 1991. The eight production facilities (400 MW) provide cooling to 500 clients for 412 GWh per year. This network is completely managed by Climespace. Since 2002, two other production facilities have provided cooling reinforced by ice, in the cooling centers of Opéra/Galfa; they have a total cooling capacity of about 20,000 kWh. Paris also proposes to develop its cold network as part of its climate change plan. As part of the city's climate change plan, two "glaciers" were integrated into the network in 2006 at the Les Halles cooling center, which has a total cooling capacity of about 30,000 kWh: 44 MW come from cooling machines and 13 MW can be added during short periods to the Cold Network of Paris thanks to stocks of ice. Enertherm, located at La Défense, has the largest ice stock in Europe, with a capacity of 240 MWh.

Lyon also has a cold network, managed by Dalkia, which bought the network from Prodith.