Vertiv opens Malaysia plant to power Asia's AI data center boom

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

What Vertiv does

Vertiv Holdings (ticker VRT on the New York Stock Exchange) makes uninterruptible power supplies, liquid and air cooling systems, and software for managing data center infrastructure. The company was spun off from Emerson Electric in 2016 and has become one of the biggest direct beneficiaries of the AI data center construction boom. Together with rival Schneider Electric, it supplies the engineering backbone that every modern compute cluster for training AI models needs to run.

• Vertiv Holdings Co. is a public company, traded on the NYSE under the ticker VRT
• The new plant has opened in Malaysia
• The facility focuses on power and cooling equipment for data centers
• The goal is to meet demand in the Asia-Pacific region, which is growing alongside AI data center construction

Why Malaysia became a data center hub

Data centers are growing especially fast in the Malaysian state of Johor, which borders Singapore. For years, Singapore restricted construction of new data centers because of limited land and energy, and the excess demand from tech companies spilled over into neighboring Malaysia, where land and electricity are cheaper. In recent years, Google, Microsoft, ByteDance, and other cloud and AI players have announced major projects in Johor and other parts of Malaysia, while local authorities are fast-tracking energy infrastructure to handle the growing load.

Why this benefits Vertiv in particular

Demand for high-capacity power and cooling is growing faster than data centers themselves. Server racks packed with AI training chips generate many times more heat than conventional enterprise servers, and power outages are especially costly for them. Building its own plant in the region lets Vertiv shorten delivery times for local customers and cut logistics costs compared with shipping equipment from the US or Europe. That matters most when major cloud and AI companies are racing to bring new clusters online.

Why demand for cooling is growing

The latest chips for training AI models draw several times more power per server than previous-generation hardware, and they increasingly need liquid cooling at the rack level rather than air cooling. That is forcing data center operators to rethink engineering decisions made before the generative AI boom and to retrofit or rebuild their power and cooling infrastructure. This is exactly the segment where Vertiv makes its money.

What it means

Vertiv's new plant in Malaysia shows that Asia's AI infrastructure boom now demands more than new data centers: it also requires local manufacturing of the equipment that powers and cools them.