Data center cooling.
The chiller lives.

Modine, a chiller maker, fell as much as 21% in one day in January. Jensen Huang had just told a CES audience that Nvidia's next systems would run on 45°C water and "no water chillers are necessary." Four and a half months later, Modine signed a deal to sell more than $4 billion of chillers to a single hyperscaler.

Huang was right about where the heat is going. He was wrong about what that does to the rest of the building.

Every watt a data center draws ends up as heat, and cooling (or "thermal management") is the business of getting rid of it. AI has turned that into a plumbing job. An Nvidia GB200 rack runs at up to about 132 kilowatts, far more than air can carry away, so liquid now runs straight to cold plates sitting on the chips. Pumps called coolant distribution units move it through the rack, and chillers, dry coolers, and cooling towers outside dump the heat into the sky.

Warmer water was supposed to shrink that last step. Instead, so many data centers are going up that every step is growing at once, and nearly every big industrial company has bought a liquid-cooling specialist in the past 18 months. That's the story of data center cooling stocks going into 2027: the heat moved into the rack, but the chiller didn't die.

This list of data center cooling stocks follows the heat out of the building. It starts with the company that sells the whole chain, then the rack-level liquid players, the equipment outside, and two private bets on the next cooling method.

One company sells nearly everything between the chip and the roof, and it's betting that every part of that chain keeps growing.

Vertiv NYSE: VRT

Vertiv is the closest thing to a pure-play on data center thermal and power gear. This year it bought a cold-plate maker and a heat-rejection company while it doubles chiller production in Italy and expands its Ohio liquid-cooling plant. That's a direct bet against the "no chillers" story.

Sales rose 24% last quarter, and the company expects about 31% organic growth for the year. One thing to know: Vertiv stopped reporting orders and backlog in 2026, after its last disclosed backlog more than doubled to $15 billion. Investors are now flying on guidance.

When liquid goes into the rack, the cold plates and pumps become a separate market, and the electrical giants paid up to own it.

Eaton NYSE: ETN

Eaton closed its $9.55 billion purchase of Boyd Thermal in March, the largest liquid-cooling deal of the cycle. Boyd makes cold plates and liquid loops that sit right on the chip.

Eaton already sold the electrical gear that powers a data center. Now it also sells the hardware that cools the chips. In its first full quarter, Boyd added 25 points to the growth of Eaton's electrical business, which came in at 44%.

Schneider Electric EPA: SU

Schneider Electric bought 75% of Motivair, a maker of coolant distribution units, for $850 million in 2025. In January it launched a 2.5-megawatt unit that scales past 10 megawatts when units are linked. Schneider already designs the power systems for AI data centers, so it can now sell a customer the power path and the coolant path as one design.

nVent Electric NYSE: NVT

nVent makes the manifolds, distribution units and enclosures that move liquid through AI racks. It has already put more than two gigawatts of liquid cooling into the field. In July it announced a new 160,000-square-foot plant in Minnesota, its third expansion in three years, with production starting in the first half of 2027. Sales grew 53% last quarter.

The heat still has to leave the building. The chiller scare hit these data center cooling stocks hardest, and the companies' order books have been the most direct rebuttal.

Modine NYSE: MOD

Modine is turning itself into a data center company. Its data center sales rose 90% last quarter to $348.6 million, and it's spinning off its legacy Performance Technologies business into a merger with Gentherm.

The $4 billion chiller deal covers 2027 through 2029. The cost of growing this fast is showing up in margins: gross margin in the data center segment fell almost 10 points as Modine paid to expand North American capacity. Modine is the most direct bet on the chiller, with all the growing pains that come with it.

Trane Technologies NYSE: TT

Trane sells the large chillers and heat-rejection systems on data center roofs and yards. Its CEO's answer to the 45°C debate was blunt: whether the water leaves at 31°C or 45°C, "it doesn't matter to us."

The orders back him up. Bookings for its big commercial equipment rose 130% last quarter, and backlog hit a record $12.1 billion. Trane also bought the rest of LiquidStack in March, adding coolant distribution units and immersion cooling to its lineup.

AAON NASDAQ: AAON

AAON is the small-cap version of the trade. Its BASX unit builds custom cooling equipment for hyperscale data centers, and that business more than tripled last quarter to $345 million. Liquid-cooling sales alone tripled to $126.6 million. Total backlog doubled to $2 billion. For a company this size, a few hyperscale programs move everything.

Today's liquid cooling pumps water past the chip. The next step uses a fluid that boils on contact and carries far more heat per drop, and these two are betting it arrives as racks head toward a megawatt.

Accelsius

Accelsius makes two-phase direct-to-chip cooling. Johnson Controls led its $65 million Series B in January, with Legrand participating. In April it released a 150-kilowatt rack with its own built-in coolant distribution unit, and it has an agreement covering a 300-megawatt data center campus in Ontario. Its parent, Innventure, trades on Nasdaq, which makes it one of the few public ways into two-phase cooling.

ZutaCore

ZutaCore builds waterless two-phase cooling, which keeps liquid water away from the electronics entirely. It raised more than $100 million in June in a round co-led by Mitsubishi Electric and Samsung's venture arm, with Carrier's venture fund returning. When three industrial giants back the same startup, they're buying a seat in case two-phase becomes the standard.

The most important buyer in data center cooling doesn't buy any cooling.

Nvidia now publishes reference designs for whole AI factories, down to the coolant temperature and the distribution units. Vendors line up to get their gear validated against them. LG's new 600-kilowatt distribution unit made news this summer simply by passing Nvidia's validation. Mitsubishi Heavy markets a chiller plant aligned with Nvidia's design. Schneider and Vertiv publish blueprints for Nvidia's new racks.

That changes how cooling gets sold. It used to be specified by the building's engineers, one project at a time. Increasingly, Nvidia sets the spec and the customer picks from the vendors that fit it.

In 2027, as racks head toward 600 kilowatts, the cooling companies that win won't just be the ones with the best products. They'll be the ones already designed into Nvidia's next reference rack. The CES remark showed how much one sentence from Nvidia can move data center cooling stocks. The reference designs show why.