The ‘Rubin Revelation’: Nvidia CEO remarks cause data centre cooling stocks to fall

The comments were made at the CES 2026 trade show in Las Vegas during Jensen Huang’s talk, with the CEO suggesting that Nvidia’s next-generation Rubin chips can be cooled using water at temperatures that do not require traditional water chillers.

This type of equipment is supplies like companies like Trane Technologies and Johnson Controls, who saw their stock lower by 2.5% and 6.2%, respectively, as fears were sparked over demand for their products. Modine Manufacturing also closed 7.5% after an earlier drop of as much as 21%, Yahoo! Finance reported.

Bloomberg Intelligence has noted that chillers are a “predominant” piece of data centre cooling equipment, so Huang’s ‘Rubin revelation’ has come as a shock to the market.

“The comments create some questions/concerns about the longer-term positioning of chillers within data centres over time, particularly as liquid cooling becomes more prominent,” Baird analyst Timothy Wojs wrote in a note to clients, as reported by Yahoo! Finance.

Liquid cooling has been hailed as a revelatory innovation in the data centre industry in recent years, as it enables systems within a data centre to operate at a higher temperature. The market responded quickly to liquid cooling, viewing it as a significant advance for the data centre industry in that it could curb growing heat management and support lower energy consumption.

Comments about Rubin could spark concerns over cooling products in the future, if chips become more widely advanced to not require cooling methods.

Currently, the ongoing AI boom has created strong appetite for cooling – given that the technology requires lots of power and energy to run. The cooling equipment is used specifically to prevent AI racks within a data centre from overheating – leading to Johnson Controls and Vertiv, for example, to witness their stock surge in 2025.

Huang’s remarks at CES have also caused data-storage stocks to rise, amid AI interest. Yahoo! Finance also reported that Sandisk Corp. stock has risen more than 1,000% from an April low after the CEO spoke about the need for memory and storage.

Citi analyst Andrew Kaplowitz told clients that the data centre cooling risk is manageable.

“While we acknowledge that the Rubin comments underscore the rapid evolution of thermal management in data centres, we don’t think this is catching our companies by surprise,” he reportedly said.

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