The AI boom has turned dull industrial relics into market darlings as data centres gulp power, steel and cooling kit.
FT research found more than 200 listed industrial, utility and mining companies linked to data centres or semiconductors beat the MSCI World Index. That index rose more than 21 per cent in the year to 9 June, even after Friday’s AI-linked sell-off over interest rate fears.
The winners include Caterpillar, better known for diggers but now flogging generators to data centre builders. The German engineering firm Hochtief, which is 150 years old and set to join the Dax this month, has ridden the same wave.
Steel supplier Nucor credited “white hot” AI demand for a “tsunami of earnings power”, which sounds like a banker swallowed a furnace. Ford Motors jumped by a fifth in May after saying its electric vehicle operation would pivot towards battery storage for data centres.
The figures show AI investors are looking beyond chips, memory and software to the grubby physical world keeping the hype machine switched on.
Dell’Oro analyst Alex Cordovil told the FT: “It’s a very exciting time for the industry. We see a lot of these industrial players needing to adapt to meet the needs of AI . . . a lot of these companies are 100-plus years old, so it’s quite refreshing to see it inject more dynamism into them.” Cordovil said.
The rush is driven by Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta and Oracle, which are projected to spend $700 billion in capital expenditure in 2026 alone.
US data centre construction spending hit $50 billion in April, while JLL expects global data centre capacity to double to 200GW by 2030.
