Analyst forecast puts data-centre piping at $4.5B by 2035, with plastics gaining share

Research firm DC Market Insights has published a forecast that the global market for data-centre piping will reach $4.50 billion by 2035, according to a press release issued on 22 October. The release promotes a paid report, and every figure below is the firm's own estimate or projection rather than measured spending.

The forecast

DC Market Insights puts the market at $1.17 billion in its 2025 base year and expects $1.60 billion in 2026, a jump of about 37% that it partly puts down to higher steel pipe prices. Its base case reaches $3.36 billion in 2030 and $4.50 billion in 2035, a compound annual growth rate of 14.42% from 2025. It also gives a low case of $3.32 billion and a high case of $5.87 billion for 2035, which shows how wide the uncertainty is.

The headline driver is cooling. The firm estimates that a new liquid-cooled AI hall contains around $190,000 of piping per megawatt, against about $70,000 per megawatt for an air-cooled chilled-water hall, or roughly 2.7 times as much.

Where plastics fit

Carbon steel and ductile iron remain the largest material segment in the model. Thermoplastics are forecast to grow from $206 million in 2025 to $1.19 billion in 2035, a CAGR of 19.13%. That puts them roughly level with stainless steel (19.47%) as the two fastest-growing materials, and well ahead of copper and carbon steel.

By system, the fastest growth is projected in liquid-cooling secondary loops and rack manifolds, and in heat-reuse export piping, though the second starts from a very small base.

North America leads

The firm says North America accounted for 42% of spending in 2025, about $492 million, with the US alone at $442 million. Asia Pacific is forecast to grow faster, at 15.91% a year. The supplier field is fragmented: by the firm's count the top five hold about 21% of the market, and the companies profiled include Georg Fischer, Aliaxis (IPEX), Victaulic, NIBCO, Perma-Pipe and Mueller Industries.

How to read it

Treat this as a directional signal rather than a sizing you can bank on. The model rests on assumptions about how much new capacity gets built (27 GW a year in its base case) and how much of it is liquid-cooled. Even so, the developments the release cites point the same way, including Georg Fischer's November 2025 launch of LiquidCore, a polymer piping system running from the coolant distribution unit to the cold plate. On these numbers, North American AI campuses are where most of the spend is today.