Vertiv
VRT · NYSESixty years of keeping computer rooms from overheating, now repackaged as Nvidia's go-to cooling and power partner for the AI era.
Who they are
Vertiv's lineage runs back to 1965, when Ralph Liebert founded Liebert Corporation in Columbus, Ohio, to build precision air conditioning for the earliest mainframe computer rooms — a problem no one else was solving at the time. Emerson Electric bought the business and folded it into Emerson Network Power, where it stayed for roughly three decades, before Platinum Equity carved it out for about $4 billion in December 2016 and renamed it Vertiv. The company went public on the NYSE in February 2020, and Giordano Albertazzi, a 25-plus-year veteran of the Liebert/Emerson/Vertiv lineage, has been CEO since January 2023. It's still headquartered a few miles from where Ralph Liebert started the whole thing.
What they do
Vertiv makes the power distribution, uninterruptible power supply (UPS), and thermal management systems that sit inside the data center itself — everything downstream of the grid connection GE Vernova and its peers supply. As GPU racks have pushed past 100 kilowatts, air cooling has stopped being viable, and Vertiv has leaned hard into liquid cooling as a result: it was selected by Nvidia in 2023 (backed by a $5 million ARPA-E COOLERCHIPS grant) to co-develop combined direct-liquid and immersion cooling systems, and it's now the named design partner for cooling and power conversion on Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin platform. The company added roughly $441.7 million in R&D spend in 2025 alone (about 5% of sales) and holds close to 3,000 registered patents.
How Vertiv makes money
Equipment sales (UPS systems, precision cooling, integrated racks, busbars, switchgear) plus a growing services business, sold heavily into hyperscale cloud providers, colocation operators, and enterprise data centers. The AI-driven ramp shows up clearly in the numbers: Q1 2026 revenue reached $2.65 billion, up roughly 30% year-over-year and ahead of analyst estimates, and the company's data-center order backlog has climbed to roughly $15 billion as of mid-2026. Vertiv joined the S&P 500 in 2024, a rare honor for a company that spent its first half-century as somebody else's subsidiary.
The bigger trend
CEO Albertazzi has been explicit that Vertiv treats this as a structural shift, not a bubble: cloud compute demand has been climbing for years, with AI compute now layered on top of it. The company has been racing to keep capacity ahead of orders, adding manufacturing sites across the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, and expanding into busbars and switchgear — adjacent product lines that push Vertiv further into territory Eaton and Schneider Electric already occupy, turning what used to be a cooling specialist into a broader power-and-thermal platform play.
Whether Vertiv's ~$15 billion backlog converts to revenue on schedule as its Vera Rubin-linked cooling designs move from co-development into volume shipments. Also watch margin: Vertiv currently trades at a rich forward multiple (recent analyst commentary put it above 45x forward earnings), which raises the bar for what "meeting expectations" actually means each quarter.
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Frequently asked questions
Vertiv builds the power distribution, uninterruptible power supply (UPS), and liquid cooling systems that sit inside a data center, distributing the electricity that arrives from the grid and removing the heat generated by AI server racks.
Modern AI GPU racks routinely draw more than 100 kilowatts, well past the point where fans and air conditioning can remove heat fast enough. Liquid cooling, circulating coolant directly to or near the chip, is now the default at that power density.
Vertiv's technology traces back to Liebert Corporation, founded in 1965, which Emerson Electric later acquired and ran as Emerson Network Power. Platinum Equity bought that business out in 2016 and renamed it Vertiv, which then went public independently in 2020.
This page describes public value-chain positioning for informational purposes only. It is not investment advice, and inclusion here is not a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Figures reflect public reporting as of mid-2026 and may have changed since.