Vertiv doubles Italy cooling capacity for AI data centers by 2026

Vertiv (NYSE: VRT), a global leader in critical digital infrastructure, announced a major expansion of its manufacturing and testing operations at its Tognana campus near Padua, Italy. The company plans to double regional chiller production capacity by the end of 2026 and will complete a new large-scale testing laboratory in early 2027, both designed to address surging demand for thermal management in AI and high-density computing environments.

The new laboratory represents a qualitative shift in Vertiv's capability. It will enable the testing of large-scale chillers and validate their integration with liquid cooling systems under high-density load conditions and extreme temperature ranges. This facility is intended to help customers validate thermal performance under expected site conditions and deploy increasingly complex cooling systems with greater speed and confidence—a direct response to the accelerating pace of AI infrastructure buildout.

CEO Gio Albertazzi framed the investment as essential to maintaining competitive leadership: "AI is driving thermal demands that didn't exist two years ago, with higher densities, faster deployment demands, and no room to compromise on reliability. The expansion at Tognana puts us further ahead with more manufacturing capacity, integrated testing, and advanced thermal management systems built for current and future generations of silicon. This investment reinforces our position at the front of the curve." The Tognana campus already functions as one of Vertiv's principal centers for cooling technology development, housing R&D, product management, manufacturing, testing, and customer engagement. It also includes a Customer Experience Center where customers and consultants can witness testing of a broad range of cooling technologies under real-world operating conditions. Vertiv, headquartered in Westerville, Ohio, operates in more than 130 countries and provides power, cooling, and IT infrastructure solutions for data centers, communication networks, and commercial and industrial facilities.

Vertiv's expansion reflects a significant shift in data center infrastructure priorities driven by the acceleration of artificial intelligence workloads. The company's CEO, Gio Albertazzi, explicitly tied the investment to the thermal demands created by AI, noting that "AI is driving thermal demands that didn't exist two years ago, with higher densities, faster deployment demands, and no room to compromise on reliability." This reflects the broader industry challenge: as AI models grow larger and training/inference becomes more computationally intensive, traditional air-cooling approaches are hitting physical limits, making liquid cooling and advanced thermal management critical competitive advantages.

The Tognana campus is positioned as Vertiv's hub for thermal innovation, integrating research, manufacturing, and customer validation in one location. By doubling production capacity and adding integrated testing capabilities, Vertiv is attempting to compress the time between design and deployment—a critical advantage in a market where customers are racing to stand up AI infrastructure. The new laboratory's ability to test chillers and liquid cooling systems under "extreme temperature ranges" and "high-density load conditions" signals that the company is engineering for the most demanding use cases, likely including hyperscaler GPU clusters and large language model training farms.

No comments yet. Be the first to share your thoughts!