UBS says orbital data centers aren't a major threat to $VRT because most of the liquid cooling stack still comes with them. Vertiv keeps exposure to cold plates, manifolds, CDUs and DCIM which UBS estimates at ~$0.8M of cooling content per MW even as chillers and dry coolers disappear. And with orbital capacity still expected to reach only ~11% of global data center capacity by 2031 UBS sees little disruption to Vertiv's core business while orbital cooling becomes an added opportunity over time.

🚀 Successful orbital rocket launches in 2026 🇺🇸 United States: 109 (SpaceX - 90) Rest of the world: 66 Rest of the world: 🇨🇳 China: 50 🇷🇺 Russia: 10 🇫🇷 France: 3 🇮🇳 India: 1 🇯🇵 Japan: 1 🇮🇹 Italy: 1

100 GW/year of orbital solar-powered AI compute is an engineering equation, not a slogan. 1 Mt of payload to orbit annually at 100 kW/ton delivers it. Starship cadence of ~10 k flights/year closes the mass. By aircraft standards that cadence is modest; relative to today’s entire rocket industry it is transformative. This is the concrete path from power-constrained terrestrial data centers to continuous, radiation-hardened orbital compute at civilizational scale. Source I Elon Musk

The fact that orbital compute is (soon) the most efficient way to build datacenters says a lot about how much excessive regulation has harmed progress on earth. It’s more efficient to fly to outer space than to try and build on land. Freedom is always on the frontier. The U.S. constitution was a breakthrough in that it protected citizens from tyrannical government. What it missed, and what we should try to integrate into the next constitution (on Mars, special economic zones, etc), is restraint against unchecked growth of regulation and government spending. I’ve been slowly collecting proposals for how that could work. Might do a post on it at some point.

SpaceX + xAI orbital AI supremacy: 100 GW added every year. 1M tons to orbit (Starship V4 @ 200t/flight = 1 launch/hour). Terafab chips + solar arrays, 24/7 power, vacuum cooling, Starlink mesh. Physics, win's.