Vertiv opens Johor facility to scale AI cooling and power output
Vertiv (NYSE: VRT) has opened a manufacturing facility in Johor, Malaysia, marking a significant expansion of its regional footprint as demand for high-density AI infrastructure accelerates across Asia. The site will produce thermal management and power infrastructure solutions, with full operationalisation expected in 2027.
The Johor facility is designed to serve enterprise, cloud, and colocation customers across Southeast Asia, North Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. Vertiv says the location offers strong connectivity to regional technology hubs and will create hundreds of skilled jobs once it reaches full capacity.
What the facility produces
The site supports end-to-end manufacturing, assembly, and witness testing for a range of Vertiv product lines. These include the CoolChip coolant distribution units, which support direct-to-chip and rear-door heat exchanger liquid cooling configurations for high-density racks. The facility will also build the Power Module and Power Skid prefabricated power systems, which Vertiv says can cut deployment time by up to 50% compared with traditional builds. A third product line, the SmartRun integrated overhead infrastructure system, is described by the company as delivering on-site deployment up to 85% faster than conventional methods.
A dedicated testing environment at the site will validate liquid cooling and integrated power solutions under customer site conditions before shipment, including simultaneous testing of multiple power modules and skids.
Chief executive Giordano Albertazzi said that as compute requirements evolve across successive generations of AI infrastructure, customers require partners capable of delivering power, cooling, and integration at scale. "The Johor facility enhances our ability to help customers deploy critical digital infrastructure more efficiently while supporting long-term growth across Asia," he said.
Market context
The opening reflects a broader capital push by critical infrastructure vendors to localise manufacturing capacity closer to Asia-Pacific data centre markets. Hyperscaler build-out programmes and a wave of government-backed AI initiatives across Singapore, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, and Australia have pushed regional data centre investment to record levels, driving demand for specialised cooling and power infrastructure that can be delivered quickly and with validated performance.
Vertiv competes in this space against Schneider Electric, Eaton, and a growing field of specialist liquid-cooling vendors including Alfa Laval and Asetek at the component level. Liquid cooling, long a niche requirement, has become a mainstream procurement consideration as GPU rack densities push beyond 100 kW per rack, a threshold where traditional air cooling becomes impractical.
Malaysia's Johor state has emerged as a significant data centre corridor, attracting hyperscaler investment from Microsoft, Google, and others in recent years. Proximity to Singapore, where land and power constraints are acute, has made Johor an increasingly attractive manufacturing and hosting location.
Regulatory and supply-chain considerations
Vertiv's decision to establish manufacturing capacity in Malaysia also reflects ongoing supply chain diversification strategies across the electronics and infrastructure sectors, partly in response to US-China trade tensions and export-control uncertainty. A regional manufacturing base reduces lead times and exposure to cross-border logistics disruption for customers in markets that may face import complexity.
The deployment-speed claims for SmartRun and the Power Skid carry forward-looking characterisations drawn from Vertiv's own modelling. Independent third-party validation of these benchmarks has not been cited in the release. Buyers evaluating these figures in procurement decisions should request site-specific performance data.