As artificial intelligence fuels the boom in data center growth, investors are eyeing a new frontier: the companies keeping these digital powerhouses cool. nVent Electric , Vertiv and Modine Manufacturing have seen their stocks soar in 2024, buoyed by partnerships with tech giants investing billions in AI infrastructure.
"The reality is data centers cannot run AI processing in any capacity without using liquid cooling," said Dean Dray, analyst at RBC Capital Markets to CNBC. "The thermal dynamics of the heat generation in the chips have reached the stage where legacy air conditioning is no longer powerful enough for the concentrated heat that gets created."Vertiv and Modine are legacy air cooling players that entered the liquid cooling market through acquisitions, while nVent is a pioneer.
"The AI-driven side of the liquid cooling market is expected to be in 25% of all data centers by 2028," Summerville said.As one of the top five companies in the world involved in data center cooling, nVent, is very well positioned to benefit, William Blair analyst Brian Drab said. The company's core product is a coolant distribution unit — what Drab called the "brains of the liquid cooling system connected to the racks in the data center." This state-of-the-art liquid cooling technology "knows how hot a chip is and delivers liquid to it – and it's doing it with thousands of chips throughout the data center," Drab explained. He has an outperform rating on nVent with an $80 price target, or nearly 10% upside from Friday's close.
The Jefferies analyst expects Vertiv earnings to grow at 24% CAGR through 2027 given its "strong incoming backlog," which could provide upside to 2025 estimates. Boroditsky also noted the company's $5 billion balance sheet capacity, which could be used for acquisitions or share buybacks, providing more upside for the stock.Modine is a third standout that historically had a rapidly growing air-cooling business. The company recently made its way into liquid cooling.