# Vertiv A critical-infrastructure company that designs and manufactures power and cooling systems for data centers. Headquartered in Westerville, Ohio. Trades on NYSE as VRT. CEO is Giordano Albertazzi; chairman is David M. Cote. Vertiv was carved out of Emerson Electric's Network Power division in 2016 when Emerson sold the unit to Platinum Equity. The engineering lineage traces back to 1965 when Ralph Liebert created the industry's first computer room air conditioning systems. The portfolio now spans UPS (uninterruptible power supply) systems, thermal management, power distribution, rack infrastructure, and monitoring software. Roughly 75% of revenue comes from data center customers. ## AI-Era Performance Vertiv has been one of the standout stock performers of the AI infrastructure cycle. The stock is up over 73% year-to-date in 2026 and has risen roughly tenfold from its 2023 lows, reaching a 52-week high of $379.93. The company guides for full-year 2026 net sales of $13.5–14.0B, with a project backlog exceeding $15B — representing 12–18 months of forward revenue. In April 2026, Vertiv acquired Strategic Thermal Labs, a specialist in cold-plate design and server-side liquid cooling for AI and high-performance computing workloads. The company also partners closely with [[NVIDIA]] on 800V DC power architectures optimized for AI data center deployments. ## Oklo Partnership In July 2025, Vertiv announced a collaboration with [[Oklo]] to co-develop integrated power and thermal management solutions for data centers deploying Oklo's Aurora small modular reactor (SMR). The concept uses waste heat from the fast-fission reactor to drive Vertiv's absorption chillers and thermal loops, significantly improving overall energy efficiency. A pilot demonstration is planned for the first Aurora deployment at Idaho National Laboratory. ## KB Relevance Vertiv is the quintessential "picks and shovels" play for [[Artificial Intelligence]] infrastructure. Every data center — regardless of who builds it or which AI workloads it runs — needs Vertiv's power conditioning, cooling, and thermal management equipment. The company's $15B+ backlog is a real-time indicator of the physical buildout documented in [[The Quest for 90 Gigawatts]], and its [[Oklo]] partnership connects the AI power story to the nuclear energy thesis the vault tracks. ## See Also - [[The Quest for 90 Gigawatts]] - [[Artificial Intelligence]] - [[Oklo]] - [[NVIDIA]]