Science & Environment
WTI, Brent fall after China press briefing
Crude oil futures fell more than 2% on Monday after a press briefing by China’s finance minister disappointed the market.
Traders have been banking on more robust stimulus in China to boost the world’s second-largest economy. Soft demand in the world’s largest crude importer has weighed on the market for months.
“China’s monetary stimulus measures failed to stimulate and the weekend’s pledge from the finance ministry to borrow more was long on cliches and phrases but short on reassuring and convincing details,” Tamas Varga, analyst at oil broker PVM, told clients in a note.
Here are Monday’s energy prices:
- West Texas Intermediate November contract: $73.93 per barrel, down $1.63, or 2.16%. Year to date, U.S. crude oil has gained about 3%.
- Brent December contract: $77.44 per barrel, down $1.60, or 2.02%. Year to date, the global benchmark is little changed.
- RBOB Gasoline November contract: $2.1044 per gallon, down 2.19%. Year to date, gasoline is little changed.
- Natural Gas November contract: $2.572 per thousand cubic feet, down 2.28%. Year to date, gas is ahead more than 2%.
The market, meanwhile, continues to monitor the Middle East in anticipation of a retaliatory strike by Israel against Iran. U.S. officials told NBC News that Israel has narrowed down the targets it plans to hit. These include military and energy infrastructure, the officials told NBC.
Science & Environment
The first U.S. commercial-scale offshore wind project
GREENPORT, N.Y. – Roughly 35 miles off the east coast of Montauk, New York, 12 turbines gently spin in the wind at Orsted’s newly developed South Fork Wind farm. The project, which connected to the grid earlier this year, is the first commercial-scale offshore wind farm in the U.S., providing enough power for 70,000 homes annually.
It’s a needed bright spot for the U.S. offshore wind industry, which has faced a number of challenges getting off the ground. Rising interest rates and supply chain snags have changed project economics, forcing some developers to return to the market in search of higher contracted prices. Other projects have been canceled entirely.
Soren Lassen, head of offshore wind research at Wood Mackenzie, said the U.S. offshore wind industry is going through a needed readjustment, and that while the long-term outlook remains intact, progress has been pushed out. South Fork Wind offers tangible evidence that wind projects can work.
A long-term investment
Traveling by way of a high-speed ferry from Greenport, New York, it takes about two hours to get to South Fork Wind. It’s hard to get a sense of just how large these turbines are until you’re right under one: they tower 460 feet above the water, with blades that are each longer than a football field. And that’s just what the eye can see. Underwater, each tower sits atop a custom foundation drilled into the seabed. Apart from the gentle “swoosh” of the blades – only audible when right next to the turbine – the wind farm is otherwise quiet in the middle of the ocean.
South Fork Wind’s substation, which is connected to the power grid in East Hampton via a subsea and then underground cable.
Pippa Stevens | CNBC
Each turbine is connected to an offshore substation – the first of its kind built in the U.S. – which is connected to the local power grid in East Hampton, New York, via a 65-mile subsea and underground cable.
South Fork Wind was not without opposition. The waters off the Long Island coast have long been a place for recreational and commercial fisherman alike, some of whom opposed the project. Residents in Wainscott – the summer community where the cable comes ashore – also fought it. This led to Orsted adding extra space between each turbine so that the area remains open both to transit by pleasure and fishing boats, and the company buried the onshore cable beneath the beach and local roads.
Denmark-based Orsted is not new to the area. The company developed the five-turbine Block Island Wind Farm, which is northwest of South Fork Wind, in 2016. And northeast of South Fork Wind sits Revolution Wind – a 65-turbine project that Orsted broke ground on in 2023. In July, Orsted began construction on Sunrise Wind, which is also in federal waters off the New York coast.
Offshore wind projects are long-term investments, with work starting years before a single foundation is even drilled into the seabed. Securing the necessary permits is a lengthy process.
The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management first awarded the leases for South Fork Wind in 2013, which where acquired by Deepwater Wind. Orsted acquired the company in 2018 and partnered with Eversource Energy to start building the project. Onshore construction began in February 2022, with offshore construction following in 2023. In September, Skyborn Renewables, a Global Infrastructure Partners portfolio company, acquired Eversource’s 50% stake in both South Fork Wind and Revolution Wind.
South Fork Wind, which is 35 miles East of Montauk, New York.
Pippa Stevens | CNBC
Offshore wind developers typically use power purchase agreements, which are signed ahead of construction. Put simply, it’s a long-term agreement between the owner and a third party who agrees to pay a specific price for the power – oftentimes for 20 years or more. At South Fork Wind, the power is being sold to Long Island Power Authority.
While this model provides long-term certainty, it can also be a huge obstacle if project costs balloon. Orsted is developing Revolution Wind and Sunrise Wind, but last year it walked away from Ocean Wind 1 and 2, which were slated to be built off the coast of Atlantic City, New Jersey.
“Macroeconomic factors have changed dramatically over a short period of time, with high inflation, rising interest rates, and supply chain bottlenecks impacting our long-term capital investments,” David Hardy, CEO Americas at Ørsted, said in October 2023. “As a result, we have no choice but to cease development of Ocean Wind 1 and Ocean Wind 2.”
In May, Orsted agreed to pay New Jersey a $125 million settlement.
The financial problems are not unique to Orsted. Equinor and BP ended a joint venture to develop a project in waters off the coast of New York in January. Equinor took sole ownership of the project and re-entered the market in search of better prices – securing a deal for Empire Wind 1, but not for Empire Wind 2, which remains on pause.
High rates, supply chain struggles
The two main obstacles around building offshore wind farms are interest rates and the supply chain. Offshore wind is capital intensive: it takes a lot of money to build one of these projects in the middle of the sea, and as interest rates rose companies’ cost of capital surged. At the same time, raw material and labor costs accelerated out of the pandemic. It’s hard to begin construction without a PPA locked in, but if costs rise significantly above initial estimates, the PPA might not be high enough for the project to be feasible.
Each turbine at South Fork Wind rises 460 feet above the water.
Pippa Stevens | CNBC
Much of the supply chain is also highly specialized. There are only a few vessels in the world, for example, that can lay the underwater cables. Turbine installation vessels are also industry-specific. The offshore wind industry is not new globally, but it is in the U.S., meaning just a few years ago a domestic supply chain was virtually nonexistent.
But some of those supply chain constraints are beginning to ease as more and more projects get off the ground. Dominion Energy is building the first Jones Act-compliant turbine installation ship in Brownsville, Texas, which will be used to transport supplies to its Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project. Once the project is completed, the ship will be contracted out to other companies.
‘Not disappearing’
Offshore wind port hubs are also popping up, including the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal, the Port of Virginia and Connecticut’s Port of New London. Orsted’s domestic supply chain now spans more than 40 states, and work for South Fork Wind took place in New York, South Carolina, Texas, Rhode Island and Connecticut, among other states.
The U.S. Department of the Interior recently approved its tenth offshore wind project – this one in Maryland – in what it called a “major milestone.” But the Biden administration’s goal of 30 gigawatts of offshore wind power by the end of this decade remains far off.
South Fork Wind’s offshore substation is the first-of-its-kind built in the U.S.
Pippa Stevens | CNBC
Vineyard Wind, off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, Massachusetts, is the only other commercial-scale offshore wind project currently powering homes. Developer Avangrid had to pause construction over the summer after a blade broke off and fell into the ocean, with parts ultimately washing ashore on Nantucket beaches. GE Vernova, which made the blade, called it a “manufacturing deviation” related to “insufficient bonding” in the blade.
Two other projects – Block Island Wind Farm and Dominion’s two-turbine Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind Pilot Project – are operational, although they are much smaller, powering 17,000 and 3,000 homes, respectively.
The U.S. does have 58 gigawatts of capacity under development, according to American Clean Power, but some of those projects won’t come online for years, and there is no guarantee all of them will be built. The industry group estimates that $65 billion will be invested in offshore wind by 2030, supporting 56,000 jobs – up from 1,000 today.
“There are cycles in everything, and now we’re going through a negative cycle,” said Wood Mackenzie’s Lassen, in an interview. “That means that what is now driving the adjustments to price are, instead of success, failures.”
But Lassen is encouraged projects are pushing forward.
“The positive thing is that then there is some readjustment,” he said. “That means the sector is not disappearing. It’s bouncing back, but it is different.”
Orsted’s Block Island Wind Farm. The turbines are supported by jacket foundations, rather than the monopiles used at South Fork Wind.
Pippa Stevens | CNBC
Science & Environment
Protecting whales from ship strikes
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How to spot 'comet of the century' in UK skies
Comet A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) could be spotted with the naked eye in the UK on Saturday night.
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Science & Environment
Book excerpt: “Nexus” by Yuval Noah Harari
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Yuval Noah Harari, the author of the bestseller “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind,” returns with “Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI” (Random House). It examines how intelligence has shaped and controlled civilizations throughout history, and the role of artificial intelligence in changing society, economics and politics.
Read an excerpt below.
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What Is Information?
It is always tricky to define fundamental concepts. Since they are the basis for everything that follows, they themselves seem to lack any basis of their own. Physicists have a hard time defining matter and energy, biologists have a hard time defining life, and philosophers have a hard time defining reality. Information is increasingly seen by many philosophers and biologists, and even by some physicists, as the most basic building block of reality, more elementary than matter and energy. No wonder that there are many disputes about how to define information, and how it is related to the evolution of life or to basic ideas in physics such as entropy, the laws of thermodynamics, and the quantum uncertainty principle. This book will make no attempt to resolve—or even explain—these disputes, nor will it offer a universal definition of information applicable to physics, biology, and all other fields of knowledge. Since it is a work of history, which studies the past and future development of human societies, it will focus on the definition and role of information in history.
In everyday usage, “information” is associated with human-made symbols like spoken or written words. Consider, for example, the story of Cher Ami and the Lost Battalion. In October 1918, when the American Expeditionary Forces was fighting to liberate northern France from the Germans, a battalion of more than five hundred American soldiers was trapped behind enemy lines. American artillery, which was trying to provide them with cover fire, misidentified their location and dropped the barrage directly on them. The battalion’s commander, Major Charles Whittlesey, urgently needed to inform headquarters of his true location, but no runner could break through the German line. According to several accounts, as a last resort Whittlesey turned to Cher Ami, an army carrier pigeon. On a tiny piece of paper, Whittlesey wrote, “We are along the road parallel [sic] 276.4. Our artillery is dropping a barrage directly on us. For heaven’s sake stop it.” The paper was inserted into a canister on Cher Ami’s right leg, and the bird was released into the air. One of the battalion’s soldiers, Private John Nell, recalled years later, “We knew without a doubt this was our last chance. If that one lonely, scared pigeon failed to find its loft, our fate was sealed.”
Witnesses later described how Cher Ami flew into heavy German fire. A shell exploded directly below the bird, killing five men and severely injuring the pigeon. A splinter tore through Cher Ami’s chest, and his right leg was left hanging by a tendon. But he got through. The wounded pigeon flew the forty kilometers to division headquarters in about forty-five minutes, with the canister containing the crucial message attached to the remnant of his right leg. Though there is some controversy about the exact details, it is clear that the American artillery adjusted its barrage, and an American counterattack rescued the Lost Battalion. Cher Ami was tended by army medics, sent to the United States as a hero, and became the subject of numerous articles, short stories, children’s books, poems, and even movies. The pigeon had no idea what information he was conveying, but the symbols inked on the piece of paper he carried helped save hundreds of men from death and captivity.
Information, however, does not have to consist of human-made symbols. According to the biblical myth of the Flood, Noah learned that the water had finally receded because the pigeon he sent out from the ark returned with an olive branch in her mouth. Then God set a rainbow in the clouds as a heavenly record of his promise never to flood the earth again. Pigeons, olive branches, and rainbows have since become iconic symbols of peace and tolerance. Objects that are even more remote than rainbows can also be information. For astronomers the shape and movement of galaxies constitute crucial information about the history of the universe. For navigators the North Star indicates which way is north. For astrologers the stars are a cosmic script, conveying information about the future of individual humans and entire societies.
Of course, defining something as “information” is a matter of perspective. An astronomer or astrologer might view the Libra constellation as “information,” but these distant stars are far more than just a notice board for human observers. There might be an alien civilization up there, totally oblivious to the information we glean from their home and to the stories we tell about it. Similarly, a piece of paper marked with ink splotches can be crucial information for an army unit, or dinner for a family of termites. Any object can be information—or not. This makes it difficult to define what information is.
The ambivalence of information has played an important role in the annals of military espionage, when spies needed to communicate information surreptitiously. During World War I, northern France was not the only major battleground. From 1915 to 1918 the British and Ottoman Empires fought for control of the Middle East. After repulsing an Ottoman attack on the Sinai Peninsula and the Suez Canal, the British in turn invaded the Ottoman Empire, but were held at bay until October 1917 by a fortified Ottoman line stretching from Beersheba to Gaza. British attempts to break through were repulsed at the First Battle of Gaza (March 26, 1917) and the Second Battle of Gaza (April 17–19, 1917). Meanwhile, pro-British Jews living in Palestine set up a spy network code-named NILI to inform the British about Ottoman troop movements. One method they developed to communicate with their British operators involved window shutters. Sarah Aaronsohn, a NILI commander, had a house overlooking the Mediterranean. She signaled British ships by closing or opening a particular shutter, according to a predetermined code. Numerous people, including Ottoman soldiers, could obviously see the shutter, but nobody other than NILI agents and their British operators understood it was vital military information. So, when is a shutter just a shutter, and when is it information?
The Ottomans eventually caught the NILI spy ring due in part to a strange mishap. In addition to shutters, NILI used carrier pigeons to convey coded messages. On September 3, 1917, one of the pigeons diverted off course and landed in—of all places—the house of an Ottoman officer. The officer found the coded message but couldn’t decipher it. Nevertheless, the pigeon itself was crucial information. Its existence indicated to the Ottomans that a spy ring was operating under their noses. As Marshall McLuhan might have put it, the pigeon was the message. NILI agents learned about the capture of the pigeon and immediately killed and buried all the remaining birds they had, because the mere possession of carrier pigeons was now incriminating information. But the massacre of the pigeons did not save NILI. Within a month the spy network was uncovered, several of its members were executed, and Sarah Aaronsohn committed suicide to avoid divulging NILI’s secrets under torture. When is a pigeon just a pigeon, and when is it information?
Clearly, then, information cannot be defined as specific types of material objects. Any object—a star, a shutter, a pigeon—can be information in the right context. So exactly what context defines such objects as “information”? The naive view of information argues that objects are defined as information in the context of truth seeking. Something is information if people use it to try to discover the truth. This view links the concept of information with the concept of truth and assumes that the main role of information is to represent reality. There is a reality “out there,” and information is something that represents that reality and that we can therefore use to learn about reality. For example, the information NILI provided the British was meant to represent the reality of Ottoman troop movements. If the Ottomans massed ten thousand soldiers in Gaza—the centerpiece of their defenses—a piece of paper with symbols representing “ten thousand” and “Gaza” was important information that could help the British win the battle. If, on the other hand, there were actually twenty thousand Ottoman troops in Gaza, that piece of paper did not represent reality accurately, and could lead the British to make a disastrous military mistake.
Put another way, the naive view argues that information is an attempt to represent reality, and when this attempt succeeds, we call it truth. While this book takes many issues with the naive view, it agrees that truth is an accurate representation of reality. But this book also holds that most information is not an attempt to represent reality and that what defines information is something entirely different. Most information in human society, and indeed in other biological and physical systems, does not represent anything.
Excerpted from “Nexus” by Yuval Noah Harari. Copyright © 2024 by Yuval Noah Harari. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Science & Environment
Starship fifth launch
SpaceX’s Starship is set to take off later on its fifth test flight as Elon Musk pushes ahead in his quest to build the most powerful operational rocket system in history.
For the first time SpaceX will attempt to catch the Super Heavy booster, which sits at the bottom of the two-stage vehicle, as it returns to the launchpad in Texas.
Being able to land the booster safely increases its chances of being rapidly reusable, which would reduce the costs of spacefaring.
It was unclear until Saturday whether the launch would even take place after SpaceX awaited approval from US authorities.
Last month SpaceX publicly accused the US government of threatening “America’s position as the leader in space” because of the time it had taken to review its paperwork on key issues like the environmental impact of the flight.
A fifth flight in just 18 months is an extraordinary feat for the team at SpaceX. The first two flights saw the vehicle blown apart not long before its missions.
However, SpaceX argue this is all part of its development plan – to launch early in the expectation of failure so that it can collect as much data as possible and develop its systems quicker than its rivals.
Since the last flight in June, SpaceX has said that its engineers have collectively worked for 12,000 hours to replace Starship’s entire heat shield with additional protections. During its last flight, as it re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere, some of the protective tiles on the surface were destroyed as the Ship was enveloped by super-heated, ionised gas.
This time SpaceX is hoping to launch the 121m-tall (397ft) system but rather than having the whole system splashdown in the Indian Ocean like the last flight, they want the Super Heavy to fly back to the launchpad where it can be caught between a pair of giant mechanical arms called the “chopsticks”.
The initial stages of the ascent will be the same as the previous four outings, with the Ship and booster separating two and three-quarter minutes after leaving the ground.
But then the booster will head back towards the launch site at Boca Chica in Texas and it will reignite its engines to slow the vehicle down from supersonic speeds. Sonic booms are expected to be heard in the surrounding area.
At the launch pad is the world’s tallest rocket tower standing 146m-high (480ft) with two giant robotic arms. These will catch the rocket booster before re-stacking it on the orbital launch mount for its next flight.
Catching the booster rather than getting it to land on the launch pad reduces the need for complex hardware on the ground and will enable rapid redeployment of the vehicle in the future.
If the Flight Director does not think it is possible then a call will be made before the boostback burn – when the rocket turns around – for the booster to land in the Indian Ocean. This will be less than three minutes into the flight.
Elon Musk and SpaceX have grand designs that the rocket system will one day take humanity to Mars, making our species “multi-planetary”.
The US space agency, Nasa, will be watching the flight attempt closely. It has paid the company $2.8bn (£2.14bn) to develop Starship into a lander capable of returning astronauts to the Moon’s surface by 2026.
In space terms that is not that far away so Elon Musk’s team have been eager to get the rocket re-launched as soon as possible.
But the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) , the US government body that must approve the flight, had previously said there would be no launch before November as it reviewed the company’s permits.
Since last month the agency and Elon Musk have been in a public spat after the FAA said it was seeking to fine his company, SpaceX, $633,000 for allegedly failing to follow its license conditions and not getting permits for previous flights.
Before issuing a license the FAA reviews the impact of the flight, in particular the effect on the environment.
In response to the fine Musk threatened to sue the agency and SpaceX put out a public blog post hitting back against “false reporting” that part of the rocket was polluting the environment.
Currently the FAA only considers the impact on the immediate environment from rocket launches rather than the wider impacts of the emissions.
Dr Eloise Marais, professor of atmospheric chemistry and air quality at University College London, said the carbon emissions from rockets pale in comparison to other forms of transport but there are other planet-warming pollutants which are not being considered.
“The black carbon is one of the biggest concerns. The Starship rockets are using liquid methane. It’s a relatively new propellant, and we don’t have very good data of the amount of emissions that are coming from liquid methane,” she said.
Dr Marais said what makes black carbon from rockets so concerning is that they release it hundreds of miles higher into the atmosphere than planes.
“They’re putting pollutants in layers of the atmosphere where they stay for two and a half, or three years, compared to pollutants close to the surface of the earth that go away after about a few days to a week. So the longer that they stay in the atmosphere, the bigger the impact they have,” she said.
In April, Nasa released its first space sustainability strategy in which it said “the chemicals used during launch raise concerns about atmospheric impacts”. It did not lay out specific solutions but committed to work with its climate team on this issue.
Science & Environment
This niche AI play is seeing business growth rates that are triple the pace of the data centers
A large hallway with supercomputers inside a server room data center.
Luza Studios | E+ | Getty Images
As artificial intelligence fuels the boom in data center growth, investors are eyeing a new frontier: the companies keeping these digital powerhouses cool.
nVent Electric, Vertiv and Modine Manufacturing have seen their stocks soar in 2024, buoyed by partnerships with tech giants investing billions in AI infrastructure. Despite the gains, Wall Street believes these cooling leaders have room to run as the fast-growing data center market they serve desperately requires liquid cooling to operate effectively.
Shares of nVent are up 23% this year, while Vertiv and Modine have rallied 133% and 125%, respectively in 2024. Yet there’s been a lot of volatility in stocks with exposure to data centers. All three names experienced massive drawdowns that coincided with Nvidia’s sell-off on Sept. 3 — when the AI darling tumbled 10% in a single session — creating a buying opportunity, according to many analysts.
That’s because historically, data centers used air cooling to manage the heat generated by traditional cloud applications. But as the AI boom continues using new chips like Nvidia’s graphics processing units to train AI models, they’re generating high density computing power, consuming far more energy, and producing more heat in the process. This shift is forcing data center operators to rethink their cooling strategies to help servers run at peak efficiency, and liquid cooling is emerging as the method of choice given it’s 25 times more effective than air-cooling.
“The reality is data centers cannot run AI processing in any capacity without using liquid cooling,” said Dean Dray, analyst at RBC Capital Markets to CNBC. “The thermal dynamics of the heat generation in the chips have reached the stage where legacy air conditioning is no longer powerful enough for the concentrated heat that gets created.”
Triple data center growth
Vertiv and Modine are legacy air cooling players that entered the liquid cooling market through acquisitions, while nVent is a pioneer. Unlike traditional air cooling — which relies on air conditioners, fans and vents to blow cool air over racks of servers — the technology uses a liquid coolant to absorb and remove heat right where it’s generated.
“The need for liquid cooling is not cannibalizing the need for mechanical (air) cooling,” Matt Summerville, an analyst at D.A. Davidson said in an interview. Instead, he expects data centers will use a hybrid of legacy air conditioning and liquid cooling systems to protect IT equipment from heat damage and for overall environmental control in data centers.
Liquid cooling, still a nascent industry, is growing sales at a rate of 45% a year — three times faster than the 15% growth rate in data centers. The total addressable market for liquid cooling is roughly $3 billion, with about 5% of data centers using it, analysts said. They expect that to accelerate.
“The AI-driven side of the liquid cooling market is expected to be in 25% of all data centers by 2028,” Summerville said.
A liquid cooling pioneer
As one of the top five companies in the world involved in data center cooling, nVent, is very well positioned to benefit, William Blair analyst Brian Drab said.
The company has been in the liquid cooling business for well over a decade, giving it the time to refine and innovate its products. Originally invented 15 years ago for high-end mechanical equipment, nVent stumbled upon a major opportunity in data center cooling.
nVent shares year to date
“They invented the liquid cooling business,” RBC Capital Markets analyst Dean Dray said, describing how data center operators discovered nVent’s products were exactly what was needed to cool high-powered servers. This kicked off relationships that nVent has “with literally all of hyperscale players,” and quietly made it a key partner in designing and testing thermal solutions for every generation of GPUs and chips, he explained.
Dray said nVent is “very guarded” about those partnerships, but will eventually need to figure out how to “explain their market presence and all of the hyperscale players they’re doing business with to get investors comfortable that these relationships exist.”
The company’s core product is a coolant distribution unit — what Drab called the “brains of the liquid cooling system connected to the racks in the data center.” This state-of-the-art liquid cooling technology “knows how hot a chip is and delivers liquid to it – and it’s doing it with thousands of chips throughout the data center,” Drab explained. He has an outperform rating on nVent with an $80 price target, or nearly 10% upside from Friday’s close.
Currently, nVent’s total revenue exposure to data centers is 23%. Half of that comes from liquid cooling, which is growing more than 40% annually. The other half comes from the electrical equipment for data centers, which is growing 15% annually.
A strong backlog of business
Vertiv has a much larger exposure to liquid cooling, with 75% of its revenue tied to data centers. The company entered the market through the acquisition of CoolTerra in December 2023. Before that, it was primarily in legacy air conditioning.
Jefferies’ analyst Saree Boroditsky estimated Vertiv’s data center revenue could grow at a compound annual growth rate of 20% over the next four years, well above the 9% to 12% top line growth management projected at its December 2023 investor day.
Vertiv shares year to date
This week, Boroditsky initiated coverage of Vertiv with a buy and a price target of $125, or about 12% from where the stock closed Friday.
The Jefferies analyst expects Vertiv earnings to grow at 24% CAGR through 2027 given its “strong incoming backlog,” which could provide upside to 2025 estimates. Boroditsky also noted the company’s $5 billion balance sheet capacity, which could be used for acquisitions or share buybacks, providing more upside for the stock.
A newcomer to the space
Modine is a third standout that historically had a rapidly growing air-cooling business. The company recently made its way into liquid cooling. In the beginning of 2024, Modine purchased intellectual property assets of TMG Core, a specialist in liquid cooling technology to accelerate data center growth. Modine’s second purchase this year was the addition of Scotts Springfield Manufacturing, a manufacturer of air handling units, adding more products to its data center solutions portfolio.
Modine shares year to date
These acquisitions will help with Modine’s data center business, which is already on pace to grow about 50% in 2024 as management focuses on higher growth end markets like cooling solutions.
At its investor day on Sept. 11, Modine provided a forecast for top-line CAGR of 18% to 22% through fiscal 2027 in its climate solutions segment where the data center business is housed, above its previous target range of 15% to 20%.
A major reason behind the higher targets is the expansion of Modine’s partnerships with hyperscalers. The company recently signed a deal with its third major customer.
“Being able to continue to penetrate these AI pioneers is absolutely going to be key for Modine to maintain market growth on an organic basis,” Summerville said. He added, the company is broadening its reach with plans to serve the Asia Pacific market, where data center activity is ramping up.
Another catalyst for Modine is the company’s commitment to having a CDU available in the market by the end of its fiscal year in March. Summerville gauges, “early excitement around the launch of their cooling distribution unit” as big data center players bring more capacity online.
Following Modine’s investor day, Summerville updated his price target on Modine stock to $155 from $140, implying 15% upside from Friday’s close, while maintaining a buy rating on shares.
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