Vertiv in the AI stack

The business and what the filings show

Vertiv makes the power and thermal equipment AI data centers need, including the liquid cooling that high-density racks increasingly require. Over its latest four quarters it reported $13.1B of revenue, +35%, at a 38% gross margin and a 20% operating margin.

Vertiv sits in the slow, physical layer of the stack, where equipment is ordered months or years ahead of a data center opening. Its growth tracks the buyers’ building programs rather than their chip purchases, and liquid cooling is the part of its business most directly tied to AI.

The questions for Vertiv are whether its margins rise as demand outruns supply, and how exposed its order book is to the timing of the buyers’ plans. New orders are a better early read than revenue.

It does this without heavy spending of its own. Over the same four quarters it generated $3.7B of operating cash flow and spent $518M on capital projects, 4% of revenue, leaving $3.1B of free cash flow. Unlike the buyers above it, Vertiv’s exposure to the build-out is through its order book rather than through capital it has already committed. Vertiv does not tag a total of remaining performance obligations, so the backlog it describes in its earnings releases is not shown here.

How AI shows up in the numbers

AI shows up at Vertiv as demand for higher-density power distribution and for liquid cooling, which AI racks increasingly need because they draw far more power than traditional servers. Its revenue tracks data-center construction rather than chip purchases, so it reflects AI demand with a lag. That lag cuts both ways: its orders keep arriving for a while after chip demand peaks, and they recover later when it picks up again.

For scale, Vertiv’s revenue over the latest four quarters equals 2% of the $566B the five largest buyers spent on capital projects over their latest four quarters. Their capex rose +81% on the year before, while Vertiv’s revenue grew +35%: slower than the spending, so it is capturing a smaller share of each new capex dollar, or more of its business sits outside the build-out.

How it talks about AI

In its latest earnings release, furnished to the SEC on October 28, 2026, Vertiv mentioned AI 0 times in 886 words of narrative text, about 0.0 mentions per 1,000 words. Of its 0 sentences about AI, 0 included a number: a revenue figure, a growth rate, a customer count or another measurable result. Across the 8 releases we read, back to February 12, 2025, AI mentions per 1,000 words went from 2.0 to 0.0.

Specific claims are easier to check against the numbers than general enthusiasm, which is why the share of AI sentences that carry a figure is worth watching alongside how often AI is mentioned. The sentences below are quoted from the release as published, after removing safe-harbor text and company boilerplate.

Source: earnings release (Form 8-K, Exhibit 99.1), October 28, 2026.

The trend in the numbers

Since the start of 2023, Vertiv’s largest quarter by revenue was Q3 2026 at $4.3B, and its highest gross margin was 39% in Q4 2025. The latest quarter set the revenue record for the period.

Quarter by quarter, Vertiv’s revenue grew +23% in Q4 2025, +30% in Q1 2026, +24% in Q2 2026, +61% in Q3 2026 on the same quarter a year earlier. Growth has been accelerating.

Gross margin in the latest quarter was 38%, against 38% a year earlier, little changed. Operating margin moved from 19% to 23% over the same span. Over the latest four quarters it turned 28% of its revenue into operating cash flow and spent 4% of revenue on capital projects, against 2% a year earlier.

Where it sits in the stack

Vertiv sits in the power, cooling and data centers layer of the AI stack. It is paid by the AI clouds layer.

Among the 16 companies in this layer on our map, it ranks number 7 by revenue and number 6 of 16 by revenue growth. Its gross margin of 38% compares with 27% for the layer as a whole, a sign that it keeps more of each dollar than its neighbors. The full layer analysis is on the power & DCs page.

Latest four quarters for 10-Q filers; latest fiscal year for 20-F filers. Companies under $100 million of revenue are left out.

Against the 16 US-listed companies in its layer, Vertiv grew +35% over the latest year versus +24% for the layer combined, and converted 24% of revenue into free cash flow versus 12% for the layer. It is taking share of the layer’s revenue.

What has to go right, and what could go wrong

What has to go right. Data-center building programs have to keep growing, and the shift to liquid cooling for dense AI racks has to keep favoring established suppliers with scale.

What could go wrong. Its order book is a bet on data centers that open years from now; a slowdown in the buyers’ building plans would show up in orders first, and competitors are expanding into liquid cooling.

These describe the conditions the business depends on, as the filings show them. They are not a view on the stock.

Through the lens of Investing in AI

Rob May’s book offers six mental models for telling AI moats from traps. The one most useful for Vertiv’s layer is “AI changes markets and corporate strategy”: When creation gets cheap, choke points move. Like the internet shifting newspaper profits to discovery, AI pushes moats toward coordination and control points. The winners sit at the new choke point, not the best AI story.

The question it asks of any company is: What becomes scarce in this value chain as AI makes the work abundant? Applied to Vertiv, the filings on this page are the place to start: the margin trend shows whether it holds scarce value or passes it through, the customer and financing disclosures show who it depends on, and the commitments show what it has promised before the revenue arrives.

Customers and concentration

US companies must disclose any customer that accounts for 10% or more of revenue, and foreign filers usually describe their largest customers. Concentration matters because a company’s growth is only as durable as the handful of buyers behind it, and in the AI stack those buyers are often the same few companies.

• We have not found a customer-concentration statement in Vertiv’s latest filings that our reader can quote cleanly; see its filings on SEC EDGAR.

Commitments and backlog

• Backlog. Vertiv doesn’t report a comparable total of remaining performance obligations in its XBRL data.

What to watch

Vertiv’s next quarterly report will cover the quarter ending around December 30, 2026. Large companies must file a 10-Q within 40 days of a quarter’s end and a 10-K within 60 days of the fiscal year’s end, so the new figures should arrive by about February 28, 2027 at the latest. This page, the layer pages and the next quarterly report all update from that filing.

• Orders and backlog commentary, which lead revenue because equipment is ordered well before data centers open.
• Gross margin as volumes grow, the sign of whether demand is outrunning supply.
• Liquid-cooling revenue, the part of the business most directly tied to dense AI racks.
• Its place in the next quarterly AI Stack Report, which updates every company on the map from the new filings.

Figures from Vertiv’s SEC filings, latest period ended September 30, 2026. Other companies: all company pages.