Daikin, a world-leading HVAC company with products in more than 170 countries and $US31.6 billion in global fiscal 2024 sales, presented its US growth outlook at the 2026 JP Morgan Industrials Conference in Washington yesterday.
Nathan Walker, senior vice president of Environmental Business Development, Daikin Comfort Technologies North America, Inc., delivered opening remarks before joining J.P. Morgan analyst Stephen Tusa for a fireside chat alongside Yu Nishiwaki, COO at Daikin Applied Americas.
"The US is entering a new era of energy demand driven by AI, electrification, and economic expansion, and HVAC is no longer just a comfort category, it's critical infrastructure," Walker said.
"Our technology can help the country grow by allowing consumers and businesses to do what they need - heating, cooling, and moving air - with few watts and a smooth load profile."
The discussion focused on how Daikin's advanced technologies are designed to make comfort and cooling efficient and how that efficiency can create new capacity to support broader US economic growth.
The company sees residential efficiency and data centre cooling as mutually reinforcing - the more efficiently Daikin delivers comfort to homes and buildings, the more capacity it can help create to power the next generation of digital infrastructure.
Walker outlined three technology levers driving Daikin's US strategy: proprietary inverter compressors, low-GWP R-32 refrigerant, and heat pump adoption.
He highlighted Daikin FIT, which brings inverter technology to mainstream ducted residential products, as central to North American residential growth.
"By bringing inverter economics into the mainstream of ducted unitary, we believe Daikin FIT can create a path to scale adoption across millions of homes," Walker said.
"That can mean real savings for homeowners and new capacity freed up to support economic growth."
Throughout the presentation, Daikin outlined a clear path toward its anticipated sustained US growth and improved returns which are centred on vertical integration, a differentiated refrigerant strategy, and a fully-stacked thermal platform.
Nishiwaki discussed Daikin Applied's North American data centre cooling business, which is expected to more than triple by 2030.
"We are evolving from an equipment manufacturer into an integrated thermal-infrastructure partner," Nishiwaki said.
"Our teams engage at the pre-design stage - modelling loads, evaluating hybrid architectures, and developing thermal roadmaps that scale with our customers' compute strategies.
“Events like this help us show how Daikin Applied's capabilities map directly to the infrastructure opportunities investors are tracking most closely."