Vertiv Opens Malaysia Factory to Power Asia's AI Data Centers Amid Boom

American data center infrastructure manufacturer Vertiv Holdings Co. opened a new plant in Malaysia to meet growing demand for power and cooling equipment for AI data centers in the Asia-Pacific region, Bloomberg reports.

What Vertiv does

Vertiv Holdings (ticker VRT on the New York Stock Exchange) manufactures uninterruptible power supplies, liquid and air cooling systems, as well as software for managing data center infrastructure. The company was spun off from Emerson Electric in 2016 and has become one of the main direct beneficiaries of the AI data center construction boom — along with its competitor Schneider Electric, it supplies the "engineering backbone" without which no modern computing cluster for training AI models can function.

• Vertiv Holdings Co. — a public company trading on NYSE under ticker VRT
• New plant opened in Malaysia
• Business profile — power and cooling equipment for data centers
• Goal — to meet the demand from the Asia-Pacific region, which is growing alongside AI data center construction

Why Malaysia became a data center hub

Data centers are growing particularly rapidly in Malaysia's Johor state, which borders Singapore. Singapore had long imposed restrictions on building new data centers due to land and energy shortages, and excess demand from tech companies overflowed into neighboring Malaysia, where land and electricity are cheaper. In recent years, Johor and other parts of Malaysia have announced major projects from Google, Microsoft, ByteDance and other cloud and AI players, and local authorities are accelerating construction of energy infrastructure to support the growing load.

Why this is profitable specifically for Vertiv

Demand for powerful power and cooling is growing faster than data centers themselves: server racks with chips for training AI models generate exponentially more heat than ordinary corporate servers, and power outages are particularly critical for them. Building its own plant in the region allows Vertiv to reduce delivery times for equipment to local customers and cut logistics costs compared to importing equipment from the USA or Europe — this is especially important when major cloud and AI companies race to launch new clusters quickly.

Why cooling demand is growing

The latest chips for training AI models consume significantly more power per server than previous-generation equipment, and increasingly require liquid rather than air cooling directly at the rack level. This forces data center operators to rethink engineering solutions laid down before the generative AI boom and to upgrade or rebuild power and cooling infrastructure — this is exactly the segment where Vertiv makes money.

What this means

Vertiv's opening of a plant in Malaysia shows that the AI infrastructure boom in Asia is already requiring not just new data centers, but also local production of equipment that powers and cools them.