European industrial giants gain €150B as data center demand surges

Four of Europe’s longest-standing industrial groups, ABB, Legrand, Siemens AG, and Schneider Electric, have added over €150 billion in market value, thanks to the boom in demand for data centers driven by the rise of artificial intelligence.

Once primarily known for electrical equipment, these firms have successfully pivoted to supplying critical components such as power systems, cooling solutions, and server cabinets, capitalizing on the rapid expansion of AI technologies.

The jump is even more striking in some cases since ChatGPT was introduced in November, with shares up over 60% at Siemens AG in Germany, for example.

European powerhouses fuel AI’s backbone as data center demand surges

European companies, makers of everything from switches to smart meters, supply the servers and infrastructure that power data centers behind advanced language models and cloud computing. Traditional electrical equipment firms like Legrand have recently doubled data center sales.

In the wake of this success, the chief financial officer of Legrand, Franck Lemery, said that, unlike Microsoft and Meta, they were not putting $70 or $80 billion on the table. He continued, “[But] we [provide] the components, and our business is growing relative to that [spending].”

Meanwhile, an analyst at Dell’Oro, Alex Cordovil, also expressed his view on the subject. He mentioned that American companies dominate a significant part of AI. However, Cordovil raised some exceptions. According to him, most of the infrastructure is controlled by European companies regarding nuts and bolts.

It is worth noting that although the companies provide power to homes and industrial groups, data centers have emerged as their fastest-growing source of income due to their heavy computing demands, like those used in AI models, and needs from gaming, cloud services, and streaming.

This concentration in data centers has also left them vulnerable to big changes in their stock prices. A notable market downturn occurred earlier this year, triggered by the introduction the large Chinese language model DeepSearch, which its developers say was trained with less processing power. Cordovil also added that investors were concerned about the constraints on power grids and supply

While these fears have some worried, there is a longer-term trend of growing demand for data processing, according to Cordovil. He speculated that data center investments will be more than $1 trillion by 2028, from nearly $600 billion in 2025.

Lemery mentioned that all this uncertainty was relative. He said they were very confident in their portfolio’s potential, emphasizing that the only way out was to deal with these ups and downs.

Generac bets big on AI boom with $130M push into data center power market

Generac Holdings Inc., a manufacturing company of backup power generation products for residential, light commercial, and industrial markets based in America, is another example of a firm that showed interest in investing in data centers.

On May 14, the company announced plans to invest approximately $130 million into new equipment and a factory to produce larger backup generators for big computing centers that run artificial intelligence applications, according to Chief Executive Officer Aaron Jagdfeld. 

During an interview, Jagdfeld mentioned that the company recently made its first international shipments of these larger generators to clients in data centers. He added that they had a strong pipeline of activity apart from that.

The significant increase in power demand from AI and new factories has drawn Generac to enter the data center market.

This level of demand has not been seen in at least a generation, and some predictions suggest it could grow at a pace not experienced since the 1950s. 

However, there is no guarantee this high demand will actually happen. This is because the expected demand for energy will be further reduced if more effective models, such as the one proposed by DeepSeek AI, are employed. Microsoft Corp. also has slowed some global data center rollouts as it rethinks its approach. As a result, the new projects have their restrictions.

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