Vertiv CEO: Liquid cooling capacity growing ‘really, really, really rapidly’

Vertiv (NYSE:VRT | VRT Price Prediction) CEO Giordano Albertazzi has a message for anyone wondering whether his company can keep up with the AI infrastructure wave: the capacity is there, and it’s growing fast.

In a recent interview, when asked directly whether Vertiv has enough liquid cooling capacity to handle the business that Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) has generated, Albertazzi was emphatic: “We’ve been growing capacity specifically in the liquid cooling and the service behind that really, really, really rapidly. So we’re very confident about our strength in that respect.”

Why Liquid Cooling Is the Whole Game Right Now

Vertiv sits at the intersection of two massive forces: AI compute density is climbing faster than anyone expected, and the thermal consequences are landing squarely on data center operators. Modern GPU clusters generate heat at a scale that traditional air cooling simply cannot manage. Liquid cooling, specifically through coolant distribution units (CDUs), is the answer the industry has landed on.

Albertazzi framed it clearly on the Q4 2025 earnings call: “CDUs in various shapes and forms are a long-term element of the thermal chain.” He also highlighted a newer product called the “trim cooler” — “a chiller that is really optimized to operate at high temperatures, but also with the flexibility for lower temperatures that coexist in systems. It is a solution that maximizes free cooling, and it is certainly very, very central to the future of the industry.”

Vertiv isn’t just selling boxes into data centers. It’s becoming the thermal architecture layer that makes high-density AI compute possible at all.

The Numbers Behind the Confidence

The Q4 2025 results make the CEO’s confidence easy to understand. Organic orders grew 252% year-over-year, the strongest order quarter in company history. The backlog hit $15 billion, up 109% year-over-year, with a book-to-bill ratio of approximately 2.9x. That backlog is legally binding purchase orders, many with advance payments attached.

Full-year 2026 guidance calls for net sales of $13.25 billion to $13.75 billion and adjusted EPS of $5.97 to $6.07. The stock has responded: VRT is up roughly 65% year-to-date and up over 200% in the past year.

To support that growth, Vertiv is stepping up capital expenditures from 2-3% of sales historically to 3-4% of sales in 2026, with new factory locations coming online. The company also deployed approximately $1 billion in strategic acquisitions in Q4 2025 alone, including the PerchRight acquisition to deepen fluid management capabilities across the full lifecycle of liquid-cooled data centers.

Albertazzi noted in the interview that AI adoption on the inference side is “really, really rapid” and represents “real, real business” — and that major customers are telling Vertiv they need more compute, not less. For a company whose entire value proposition is keeping that compute cool and powered, that’s the only signal that matters.