Four of Europe’s oldest industrial groups have added more than €150bn to their market caps on the back of soaring demand for data centres driven by the boom in artificial intelligence.
European makers of everything from switches to smart meters are providing the servers and infrastructure that power data centres for large language models and cloud computing, with traditional makers of electric equipment such as Legrand doubling their revenues thanks to data centres in recent years.
“We’re not putting $70 or $80bn on the table like Microsoft and Meta,” said Franck Lemery, chief financial officer of Legrand. “[But] we [provide] the components and our business is growing relative to that [spending].”