Giordano Albertazzi and the long apprenticeship behind the AI rush

When Giordano Albertazzi was asked what he had wanted to become as an eight-year-old, his answer was an engineer. He became one. Then, in a small joke at his own expense, he expressed relief that he was no longer designing anything. For someone running a business that helps keep the digital economy switched on, it was an appealing admission: professional advancement occasionally means letting somebody else hold the pencil.

Today, the pencil has a considerable amount of work to do. Albertazzi is chief executive of Vertiv, the Ohio-based supplier of power, cooling and other infrastructure that data centers require. The public conversation about artificial intelligence tends to favor the dazzling part: the model, the chip, the answer appearing on a screen. His business lives among the equipment that makes those moments possible. Electricity must arrive. Heat must leave.

His route into this moment was unusually patient. He joined Emerson Network Power, the business that became Vertiv, in 1998. By the time he became CEO on January 1, 2023, he had spent nearly a quarter-century moving through its operations. The AI rush met an executive who had already worked through a substantial portion of the instruction manual.

An education with a factory attached

Albertazzi grew up in Milan and studied mechanical engineering at the Polytechnic University of Milan. He also earned a master’s degree in management at Stanford. His early career was at Kone Elevators, in operations and product development. Elevators provide a useful introduction to engineering’s social contract: the people using the product would very much prefer it to work every time.

Inside Emerson Network Power, he became a plant manager, then moved into European, Middle Eastern and African marketing and product management. He later ran the Italian market business. Services leadership followed, first for Liebert Europe and then across the wider EMEA region, before a move into sales leadership.

That sequence matters because each job sees a different company. A plant manager encounters the production schedule. A service executive encounters the installed equipment and the customer who needs it working. A sales leader encounters the promises. Moving between them provides opportunities to discover where a promise becomes somebody else’s problem.

In 2016, as Emerson Network Power became the standalone Vertiv business, Albertazzi was leading EMEA. He moved to the Americas presidency in March 2022, became chief operating officer that October, and took the CEO job the following January. This was a succession built through regional responsibility and operating experience, with relatively little mystery about his familiarity with the products.

The demand was already waiting

The timing can make his appointment look like a perfectly placed wager on AI. The original assignment was more prosaic. Vertiv needed stronger execution, financial performance and a culture capable of sustaining both. At his appointment, executive chairman Dave Cote pointed to Albertazzi’s improvements in EMEA and his work on the Americas turnaround. The board was selecting an operator with a record inside the building.

There was already plenty to deliver. Vertiv entered the succession with a reported order backlog of $4.7 billion at the end of the third quarter of 2022. Demand is flattering; a backlog is also an obligation. Customers waiting for equipment are generally less interested in the beauty of a growth story than in the arrival date.

The letter Albertazzi and Cote sent shareholders after 2023 described tighter supply-chain resilience, lean methods and greater accountability. These are rather unglamorous subjects for an industry enjoying the attention of the AI age. They are also the subjects that decide whether attention becomes a dependable business. A larger order book does not assemble itself.

The cloud develops a plumbing problem

The technical stakes became especially tangible in October 2024. Vertiv and NVIDIA released a power-and-cooling reference architecture for NVIDIA’s GB200 NVL72 platform. The design covered up to seven megawatts and supported racks drawing as much as 132 kilowatts. Those figures describe the capacity of a particular design, rather than the power draw of every data center.

For Albertazzi, this is where the relationship with NVIDIA becomes practical. A reference architecture gives customers a coordinated starting point for equipment that must operate together. The power train, rack and cooling arrangement cannot each pursue a private ambition. One component’s triumph can become another component’s headache.

The design combined liquid and air cooling. That combination offers a useful corrective to the temptation to imagine one new technology sweeping everything else away. Physical systems accumulate requirements. Different parts of the installation still need different ways of shedding heat, and the overall result depends on how well those methods cooperate.

In Vertiv’s account of 2024, Albertazzi and Cote also emphasized installation and ongoing operations, alongside reference designs and thermal development. The company described roughly 4,000 field service engineers. His earlier services career gives this part of the business particular resonance: a system’s working life continues long after the product announcement has disappeared from the news.

Ready before the chips arrive

By July 2026, Albertazzi was describing another scheduling problem. Infrastructure must be ready when a new generation of computing equipment begins shipping. Waiting until the chips arrive would leave an expensive collection of electronics searching for a suitable home. He described working with silicon partners so that the supporting facilities can be planned in advance.

He offered a compact description of Vertiv’s contribution: “Vertiv builds that runway.” The image is useful. A runway has to exist before the landing, and its adequacy is tested by something considerably less forgiving than a presentation. In this case the landing involves power, cooling, space and the timetable of a customer investing in computing capacity.

He called access to electricity, permitting and construction constraints pacing items. His argument was that they govern how fast the industry can build, while investment and engineering can change what is possible. That is an executive’s stated outlook, with all the uncertainty a rapidly developing market carries. It also explains why his attention keeps moving beyond individual cooling units.

In September 2026, Vertiv agreed to acquire UtilityInnovation Group, which works on microgrids, advanced controls and power architecture behind the utility meter. The announced terms included approximately $1.45 billion in cash at closing, with additional payments tied to performance. The agreement, subject to approvals and closing conditions, would extend the company’s work toward the source of power itself.

“Vertiv builds that runway.”

Giordano Albertazzi, July 2026

An operator returns to the pipes

The same month brought a smaller but revealing announcement: an agreement to acquire King Environmental Services, a specialist in fluid management, commissioning and load testing. The planned transaction would extend capabilities into EMEA, building on the North American fluid-management business Vertiv had established through PurgeRite. Closing was expected in the fourth quarter of 2026.

The details have the pleasingly stubborn texture of real machinery. Liquid-cooling systems need clean, balanced fluid circuits. Contamination, trapped air and poor flow can undermine performance. The cleverest chip in the room does not get a vote on whether a pipe has been properly prepared. Somebody has to do the work and check the result.

On October 5, Vertiv appointed Michael Resha to lead manufacturing, logistics and operational excellence. His responsibilities included scaling manufacturing and advancing the Vertiv Operating System. Set beside the acquisitions, the appointment makes Albertazzi’s current task easier to see: add technical capabilities while developing the organizational capacity to deliver them.

Another announcement on October 14 addressed enterprises moving AI from pilots into production. Vertiv introduced infrastructure-planning work with Deloitte’s Center for Integrated Research and a guide developed with STL Partners. The emphasis was on deciding where workloads should run and what their physical support requires. The underlying question follows Albertazzi from factory management into the CEO’s office: what must be ready for the promised result to happen?

Columbus, beyond the airport

There is another side to a career spent moving among regions. Albertazzi’s early visits to Columbus largely followed the familiar business-travel triangle of airport, office and hotel. Moving there in 2022 gave him a different view. The Milan-raised executive settled downtown and discovered a city with an arts life that the hotel itinerary had managed to conceal.

A lifelong classical-music enthusiast, he became involved with the Columbus Symphony. He joined its board in December 2024 and is now listed as a co-vice chair. The orchestra also names him as a $75,000 Diamond Benefactor of its 75th-anniversary celebration. His interest has become a public commitment, extending beyond an appreciative seat in the audience.

His wish for his adopted city is wonderfully consistent with the rest of his working life: more international flights. A global executive can admire an orchestra and still notice an awkward connection. The request is modestly revealing. Even away from racks and cooling circuits, access and connections remain practical concerns. Columbus became a home when he finally had time to see what lay between the scheduled stops.

The next drawing

Albertazzi’s public account of his career is refreshingly free of inevitability. In a 2026 conversation with Andy Serwer, he described joining the business as a decision prompted by curiosity, followed by opportunities to broaden his experience. He called himself an operations person whose successive jobs had expanded his understanding of general management. The career looks orderly in retrospect; his telling leaves room for coincidence.

The pattern offers a useful way to read his ambitions. He wants Vertiv to improve execution while anticipating the requirements of future computing systems. The acquisition agreements, manufacturing appointment and infrastructure-planning work all sit within that effort. Their eventual results will depend on integration, delivery and customers’ decisions, as well as on the appetite for AI.

The child who wanted to become an engineer now works at a scale where drawing every part is impossible. His responsibility is to make the parts, the people and the schedules fit. That leaves him with a demanding version of the old engineering problem: a new machine is coming, the world wants it quickly, and somebody must make certain the building is ready.