CAPITAL GOODS : System providers best-positioned - liquid cooling expert takeaways

Research evidence excerpt

CAPITAL GOODS : System providers best-positioned - liquid cooling expert takeaways

Refinitiv

The future of liquid cooling – industry expert call takeaways

We hosted a leading data center liquid cooling expert, Venkata Vulisetti, on a call with

investors to discuss the future of the industry. Mr. Vulisetti is an industry consultant and

ex-Microsoft executive who served as Director of Supply Chain, Data Infrastructure and

Provisioning. Below we highlight our key takeaways from the call.

System level providers best-positioned for growth: The expert spoke at length about

competitive trends, suggesting manufacturers which provide complete end-to-end

systems for cooling offer the best value proposition for hyperscale customers. He

believes point solutions providers, such as Taiwanese players Auras and AVC, may be

exposed in a future where singular point solutions become more commoditized. Players

like VRT and ETN, which offer more holistic solutions from the grid to the chip, stand to

benefit, and we view scale, agility, speed, and customization as key differentiators.

Furthermore, he emphasized the value-add of services and software, which tie the full

solution together and can meaningfully improve overall value proposition, which we think

is most positive for VRT.

- “Power understands thermal”: Thermal management is very power intensive, and

the expert views an ability to converge power and thermal management offerings as

a point of differentiation. We think ETN and VRT benefit the most from this in our

coverage. Rack power draw and heat generation are correlated, and as compute

densities rise in future rack architectures, we think this only leads to increasing

demand for integration and interoperability between power and thermal offerings.