What to Do When You Are Late to a Market

Most companies decide against a market by looking at the leaderboard. The incumbents hold the share and the customers, and the math says stay out. That is the position a Fortune 500 electronics manufacturer was in when it came to Acuvity in 2020.

The company wanted to expand into data center cooling, and every headline number told it not to bother. Acuvity ran a market study that said otherwise. That study, The 8% Bet, is attached as a use case study at the end of this post. What follows is the short version, and the three corrections that changed the client’s decision.

The Market the Client Was Looking At

• The global data center cooling market was worth $9.79B.
• The top seven vendors held 42% of it.
• Legacy perimeter cooling drove two-thirds of all revenue.
• The manufacturer had no thermal products and no cooling customers.

It did have manufacturing scale, an established data center power business, and deep compute-ecosystem relationships. Whether those assets transferred into a new category was the open question, and leaders in the U.S., Germany, and Sweden each had a different answer.

Correction One: A $3.9B Market, Not $9.8B

The first correction was arithmetic. Acuvity sized the market, then stripped out every segment the company could not supply. The $9.79B headline came down to $3.9B. A smaller number is easier to plan against than a large one padded with revenue you will never see.

Correction Two: Back the Segment That Was Moving

The second correction was directional. Liquid cooling held under 8% of market revenue, which is exactly why most entrants ignored it. It was also the only part of the market whose share was moving quickly. The recommendation was to target the vendor leading that segment, not the vendor leading the market.

The biggest player tells you where a market has been. The fastest-moving one tells you where it is going.

Correction Three: Name the Gap First

The third correction was uncomfortable. Modular data centers were the largest prize and the company’s weakest position, because it had no turn-key delivery capability. Naming that early meant entry could start elsewhere instead of stalling on a gap nobody had admitted to.

What Changed for the Client

Acuvity tested all of it against nine executives inside the industry, which is where the weaker entry routes fell away. The company closed the engagement with one shared view across three countries, a $3.9B target, a ranked customer list, a phased plan, and a named capability gap. The argument became a decision.

Six Years of Public Record

Entry advice is cheap. What matters is whether the reading of the market held up.

• That under-8% segment is now sized between $4B and $8B on its own for 2026 [2][3].
• That $9.79B market is projected to reach $21.0B in 2026 [1].
• The two largest cooling vendors bought liquid cooling capability rather than building it, in December 2023 and October 2024 [4][5].

Liquid cooling is now foundational to AI infrastructure. In 2020 it was the part everyone was comfortable skipping.

Questions We Get Asked

What did the study actually recommend?

Enter through liquid cooling rather than the legacy segment, target the vendor leading that segment instead of the market leader, and close the turn-key delivery gap before competing for modular data centers. The full reasoning is in the attached use case study.

How do you size a market you have never sold into?

Start from the headline figure, then remove every segment you could not supply if you won it. What remains is the market you can plan against, usually much smaller and far more useful.

Read the Full Use Case Study

Our use case study, The 8% Bet, is attached to this post. It covers the client’s starting position, the three-phase method behind the study, the findings in full, and where the market has gone since.

Most entry decisions stall the same way this one did, with capable people holding different views and no evidence to settle it. Acuvity Consulting builds that evidence. To discuss a market under consideration, book a call: calendly.com/venkatavasarala

Sources

[1] Fortune Business Insights, Data Center Cooling Market Report

[2] MarketsandMarkets, Data Center Liquid Cooling Market ($4.07B in 2026)

[3] Grand View Research, Data Center Liquid Cooling Market ($8.17B in 2026)

[4] Vertiv, acquisition of CoolTera Ltd. (December 4, 2023)

[5] Schneider Electric, acquisition of controlling interest in Motivair (October 17, 2024)