Thermal management has become one of the harder engineering constraints in AI infrastructure. As GPU clusters grow denser and per-rack power loads climb, data centre operators need cooling that can absorb more heat at lower cost and with fewer refrigerants that damage the climate. ThermoKey, founded in 1991 and headquartered in Rivarotta, Italy, has spent three decades building dry coolers, heat-exchange solutions, and equipment compatible with low-GWP and natural refrigerants.
The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Vertiv said ThermoKey's Rivarotta site will continue as a manufacturing, engineering, and support hub, and that Giuseppe Visentini will stay on as CEO of the acquired business. That continuity matters: ThermoKey has long-standing relationships with OEMs and system integrators that Vertiv will want to keep.
For Vertiv — which already used ThermoKey technology in select thermal solutions before the deal — the acquisition closes a gap in what it calls the "full thermal chain." The company sells power, cooling, and IT infrastructure to data centres in over 130 countries, and the pressure to offer integrated thermal architectures has intensified as AI workloads require cooling that can scale with successive compute generations.
Giordano Albertazzi, Vertiv's CEO, framed the deal in terms of deployment speed: customers scaling AI infrastructure quickly need thermal performance that does not become the bottleneck. The ThermoKey acquisition gives Vertiv more European manufacturing capacity and a portfolio of refrigerant-flexible heat rejection products to offer as a single vendor.
The deal is part of a broader consolidation in data centre thermal management. AI factories — large GPU clusters running sustained high-density workloads — are pushing liquid and rear-door cooling to the foreground, and every major infrastructure vendor is trying to cover more of the stack to avoid being locked out of the specification process.
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