80-year-old AC maker becomes AI darling under retired CEO's turnaround

David Cote's career path—from night-shift GE worker to Honeywell CEO, then to retirement at Goldman Sachs seeking a new mission—mirrors the unconventional trajectory he engineered at Vertiv. After Jack Welch fired him in 1999 with unexplained finality, Cote rose to lead Honeywell through a methodical strategy of acquisition and operational tightening, buying over 100 companies and delivering returns that beat the market by 150 percentage points over 15 years. That same playbook—identifying overlooked operators, repositioning them toward growth markets, and improving margins through engineering focus—proved portable to Vertiv.

What made Vertiv's opportunity unique was not AI itself, which was nascent in 2019–2020, but Cote's prescient reading of the underlying trend: data generation was exploding far faster than data-center expansion, creating an inevitable supply constraint. Vertiv's prior owners (Emerson Electric, then private-equity firm Platinum Equity) had dismissed the business as "horrible," unable to see past its legacy customer base of banks and routine cloud operators. Cote's first move was to reposition Vertiv toward hyperscalers like Google and Microsoft—the companies that would drive the next phase of infrastructure buildout. When the AI boom arrived, Vertiv was already positioned at the center.

The path was not linear. Three weeks after Vertiv's March 2020 IPO, COVID-19 struck, and Wall Street feared bankruptcy. By early 2023, gross margin collapse from 20–30% underpricing had driven the stock down 55% to $13. Rather than withdraw, Cote doubled down, installing mechanical engineer Giordano Albertazzi—a veteran of both Emerson and the shop floor—as CEO in January 2023, and committing to sustained R&D investment. That willingness to fix a "big speed bump" rather than declare victory distinguished Vertiv from the many SPACs that failed to outlive their sponsors.