New York, January 8, 2026, 15:23 ET — Regular session
- Vertiv shares were down about 7% in afternoon trading, after touching an intraday low near $159.
- The selloff comes as investors reassess AI-linked stocks and debate how next-gen chips could shift data-center cooling spend.
- Traders are watching Friday’s U.S. jobs report and the company’s next earnings update for order and margin signals.
Shares of Vertiv Holdings fell about 7% on Thursday, trading near $159.55 and sliding as low as $158.78 after opening around $171.26.
The drop lands in a market that has started to punish expensive AI-adjacent names on bad days and ask harder questions on good ones. “While AI is still hot, there are going to be winners and losers,” Art Hogan, chief market strategist at B. Riley Wealth, said, as U.S. tech stocks lagged. Reuters
That scrutiny sharpens on Friday, when the Labor Department is due to publish its December employment report at 8:30 a.m. ET, a key read for rate-cut expectations early in the year.
Vertiv has been caught in a debate over how data centers cool the next wave of chips. At CES this week, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said “no water chillers are necessary for data centres,” and Barclays analysts warned investors not to shrug off Nvidia’s claims, even if they “seem rather dramatic,” after the comments hit HVAC-linked stocks. Reuters
Vertiv, for its part, leaned into the theme on Thursday, publishing a “Frontiers” trends report that flagged digital twins and adaptive liquid cooling as 2026 priorities. “The data center industry is continuing to rapidly evolve,” said Scott Armul, Vertiv’s chief product and technology officer; a digital twin is a virtual replica used to simulate a facility, while liquid cooling moves heat with fluid instead of air. PR Newswire
Investors will want to see whether that shift shows up in order growth and service pull-through, not just slides and forecasts. The stock’s sharp drop below $160 put the focus back on near-term positioning after a fast start to the year.
But the downside case is not hard to sketch: if chip efficiency really reduces traditional cooling demand, or if big data-center customers stretch build schedules, Vertiv could face slower order momentum and tougher comparisons, even with liquid cooling ramping.
Next up is Vertiv’s earnings report, which market calendars estimate around February 11, when management updates guidance and traders parse backlog, margins and the pace of AI-driven deployments.
