What the Company With the Highest Stock Gain From AI Actually Does Is Extremely Grim

Ouch.

Cool Down

In the two years since ChatGPT was unleashed upon the world, the company whose stock value has risen the most from the technology might come as a surprise.

As CNBC reports based on data from the Jefferies investment bank, a lesser-known Ohio-based cooling company called Vertiv Holdings beat out chipmaker Nvidia in terms of the most explosive AI investment in the United States, climbing more than 860 percent in value since the end of 2022 — while Nvidia rose just 800 percent over a similar period.

Unlike startups OpenAI and Nvidia, Vertiv's history goes back more half a century to the invention of the first computer room cooling prototype by Ralph Liebert, who sold IBM its first cooling centers back in 1965 under the company's former name, Liebert Corporation.

Known as "precision air conditioning," this sort of computer cooling has long been an integral part of the computing industry — but with the rise of AI and its unprecedented compute needs, Vertiv's market value has exploded into the billions.

This year alone, the cooling firm's stock has more than tripled in value, from about $45 per share in January to $147 at its peak in mid-November. Though it's dropped a bit since then to about $130, its incredible run highlights a grim reality about the AI boom's environmental toll: the computing power it demands is so great that the facilities providing it need to use even more energy to cool themselves down, just to the chips can keep functioning.

Energy Eaters

In other words, these power-hungry data farms are now so integral to the tech world that the company that cools them off is a red-hot investment in the AI space.

According to a McKinsey report from last year, air cooling accounts for roughly 40 percent of data centers' massive and steadily growing electricity consumption, meaning that this form of cooling is clearly part of AI's environmental problem.

Though that massive environmental toll seems impossible to ignore from the outside, however, Vertiv itself couldn't be more thrilled with its growth.

"We believe we are in a very strong position to really enjoy the benefits — the acceleration of demand that AI is driving to the entire datacenter industry, and we are a leader in data center infrastructure," company CEO Giordano Albertazzi told CNBC in October. "I’m very optimistic about the future."

More on AI energy use: AI Datacenters More Than 600 Percent Worse for Environment Than Tech Companies Claimed