The Data Center Cooling Trade: Who Wins After the CME Outage
When a single overheated facility can shut down one of the world’s most important futures exchanges, “data center cooling” stops being a boring line item and becomes systemic risk.
That’s exactly what the CME outage highlighted: AI-heavy racks are now drawing so much power per square foot that cooling, not servers, is the choke point. Over the next 12–24 months, the easiest response for exchanges, hyperscalers, and colo operators is simple: spend more on cooling, and spend it faster.
This piece maps the likely corporate winners from that shift and sketches out where the upside still looks compelling vs where the market is already paying full price.