Buy the Rumor; Sell the News

Forget GPUs: Follow the Coolant

Thermal economics, geographic arbitrage, and the capital risks hiding inside the AI infrastructure boom

Dave Friedman's avatar
Dave Friedman
Jul 09, 2025
∙ Paid

Welcome to the latest edition of Buy the Rumor; Sell the News. In today’s post, I take a look at cooling tech for AI data centers.

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Everyone’s watching GPUs. Few are watching the coolant swirling around them. That’s a mistake. Because as the AI boom ramps, the thermal constraints do, too. Miss the thermal layer and you risk mispricing entire campuses, possibly shaving hundreds of basis points off IRR.

You could say the AI data center of 2025 is less a warehouse of blinking lights and more a carefully tuned liquid-fed factory. For investors chasing the second order of the AI buildout, the real edge may not lie in Nvidia’s supply chian or chip-packagers. It may lie in who figures out how to keep these digital furnaces from melting down.

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