Vertiv has opened its first Southeast Asian manufacturing base in Johor, moving power and cooling production into the region to serve fast-rising AI demand, even as the Johor data centre market it is scaling into becomes more selective about approvals. The plant in Senai, which Vertiv unveiled on July 1, is the company’s answer to a shift it can already see coming in its customers’ racks.
Paul Churchill, Vertiv’s vice president and general manager for Asia, said the company works closely with Nvidia on power and cooling ahead of each chip release, and that rack densities are climbing from 10kW toward 100kW and beyond. At those levels, he said, you physically cannot get enough power into a rack without moving to higher-voltage 800V DC designs, which are appearing first in the US and are expected to follow in Asia.
Building that gear inside the region, rather than shipping it in, is how Vertiv intends to keep pace. The roughly 236,000 sq ft facility makes the CoolChip coolant distribution units that liquid-cooled AI racks rely on, along with prefabricated power and SmartRun systems that Vertiv says can cut on-site deployment time by up to 85%.
Andrew Whall, its vice president of operations and service operations for Asia, said the plant has been operational since the first quarter and has been shipping units of its XDU liquid-cooling line for several months. It is running phase one now, with later phases adding a new liquid-cooling line and larger SmartRun builds, and full technical capacity expected around the second or early third quarter of 2027.
Vertiv would not disclose its investment, with Churchill calling the plant the first of further stages in Johor. The site is targeting up to 500 skilled jobs by the time it is fully operational. Churchill told Tech Wire Asia separately that between 100 and 150 people are on the floor today, and that about 98% of them are Malaysian.
He said Vertiv had expected to bring in labour from outside, as other manufacturers in the region have done, but local recruitment drives filled the roles instead. The first hiring preference, he said, is local, with skill-based the deciding factor.
The pull to manufacture locally comes down to speed. Churchill said customers want shorter lead times, and that shipping products from outside the region carries delay and cost risk, pointing to the freight disruptions of the past couple of years. Malaysia met Vertiv’s criteria on connectivity and local talent, he said, with support from state agencies smoothing the setup. Serving the Asian market from within Asia, at the scale demand now calls for, was the logic.
Vertiv is scaling into a market that has started to tighten. A representative from the Malaysian Investment Development Authority (MIDA) said Malaysia has approved 52 data centre projects, of which 17 are operational, with the rest at various stages of construction and approval. Invest Johor said the state has grown more selective on new data centres, weighing their power and water demands against other sectors it wants to grow, and pressing incoming projects to commit to local suppliers.
Johor has carried the bulk of the country’s data centre buildout, and the strain on its grid and water supply is what the tighter gate is meant to manage. None of that appears to worry Vertiv. Asked about warnings that hyperscalers are trimming capital spending, and whether AI infrastructure is in a bubble, Churchill said it was not something he could really comment on, but that customer demand remained “extremely healthy,” with a three-to-five-year investment runway across Asia.
Vertiv is building for demand and expects to keep climbing. What Johor is now weighing is how much of that demand it can afford to power and cool.
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