While some segments of the U.S. economy are cooling, the growth of data centers remains red hot.

That reality has translated into business opportunities for nVent, which announced Wednesday that it will open a new data center solutions manufacturing facility in early 2026 in Blaine.

When the 117,000-square-foot Blaine facility is fully operational, nVent expects to employ more than 175 people at that leased plant. Within the past two years, nVent added production space in Anoka to increase its manufacturing capacity to provide data center solutions. In total, the expansions in Anoka and Blaine will add more than 325 jobs to nVent’s payroll.

Data centers provide core infrastructure for the rollout of AI or artificial intelligence, which increasingly is being used in small to large workplaces.

nVent, a global public company that offers electrical connection and protection products, is experiencing high demand for liquid cooling products that are needed inside data centers. Corporate offices for nVent are located in St. Louis Park.

“We play a key role in building out AI infrastructure with our innovative liquid cooling solutions, and our investments in innovation and expanding production capacity with this new facility underscores that,” Sara Zawoyski, president of nVent Systems Protection, said in a written statement. “nVent’s focus on customers, along with our technical expertise, innovation and ability to manufacture at scale is why many of the world’s leading companies bring their most complex challenges to us.”

In announcing the Blaine expansion, nVent said that it has “a strong track record of solving the toughest cooling challenges for global cloud service providers” and that it has “collaborated with leading chip manufacturers to deliver liquid cooling solutions at scale.”

In a late 2023 interview with Twin Cities Business, nVent CEO Beth Wozniak talked about the importance of data centers to nVent’s revenue growth. Data centers are part of a digitalization trend, and nVent has been delivering products and services that include cable management, sensing, enclosures, and liquid cooling. By 2024, nVent revenue associated with data centers was about half a billion dollars.

On Aug. 1, nVent reported financial results for the second quarter of 2025, which showed sales increased 30% to $963 million. Organic sales rose 9%, and that figure excludes the effects of acquisitions and currency fluctuations.

“Our teams are doing outstanding work executing on our integration playbook and accelerating our growth synergies,” Wozniak said in a written statement. “We are raising our full-year sales and updating our earnings-per-share guidance to reflect our terrific second quarter performance and our increasing momentum in data centers and power utilities.”

The new nVent jobs in the northern suburbs are surfacing at a time when business and civic leaders want to jumpstart employment growth in the Twin Cities metro area.

At a gathering at the University of St. Thomas in mid-August, business and civic leaders discussed strategies for boosting the Twin Cities economy.

Concerns were expressed that the Twin Cities metro was falling behind U.S. peer cities. The 2.9% annual job growth in the Twin Cities metro ranked 11th among the dozen metro areas studied.