AI data center stocks: who gets paid to build the buildout
An AI data center is a building engineered around one problem: feeding tens of thousands of accelerators with enough electricity and removing the heat they give off. The AI buildout has turned those buildings into the largest private construction program in the United States, and a whole layer of companies now lives on that spending: the GPU clouds that operate the capacity, the landlords that own the shells, the server integrators that fill the racks, and the electrical, cooling and construction firms that make the sites work.
The names on this page are graded by how directly that spending reaches their revenue, because the label covers very different businesses. A GPU cloud lives or dies on the buildout. A diversified electrical vendor merely has a strong segment. Treating them as one trade is how people end up owning the wrong risk, and sorting that out is what this page is for.
Updated · newest price in the table below
How the group traded
Unweighted average of the 28 constituents that had a live quote in the most recent session. This is a read on how the group traded, not an index and not a tracked return series.
The companies
Operators: the GPU clouds
The companies whose product is the capacity itself, renting accelerator time to AI labs and hyperscalers under multi-year contracts. The most direct exposure on this page, and the most concentrated: a handful of customers account for most of the revenue at nearly every name in this tier.
| Ticker | Company | Exposure | Why it is here | Price | Day | Market cap | Next earnings | Our coverage |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CRWV | CoreWeave, Inc. | Direct | The largest of the listed GPU clouds, built on long-term take-or-pay contracts with a short customer list. The pure expression of the buildout, in both directions. | $87.85 | -2.13% | $48.5B | Nov 11, 2026 | 42 |
| NBIS | Nebius Group N.V. | Direct | GPU cloud building and operating its own sites in the US and Europe rather than leasing capacity from others. | $219.13 | -0.45% | $59.6B | Nov 10, 2026 | 46 |
| IREN | IREN LIMITED | Direct | Former bitcoin miner whose power-secured sites became its real asset. Now sells AI cloud capacity off that footprint. | $41.88 | -1.69% | $15.0B | Aug 27, 2026 | 40 |
| APLD | Applied Digital Corporation | Direct | Builds AI campuses and leases them under long-term agreements. Its story trades almost entirely on lease announcements, which makes contract terms the thing to read first. | $27.21 | -5.03% | $7.7B | Oct 8, 2026 | 23 |
| CORZ | Core Scientific, Inc. | Direct | Converted miner with multi-year AI hosting contracts now representing the bulk of its forward revenue. | $17.81 | -3.15% | $5.7B | Oct 23, 2026 | 17 |
| WYFI | WhiteFiber, Inc. | Direct | AI data center and GPU cloud operator funding its buildout with successive convertible raises, which makes the financing window its binding constraint. | $20.72 | -2.08% | $805M | Nov 12, 2026 | 5 |
Miners turning into data centers
Bitcoin miners hold exactly what the buildout is short of, powered sites with grid connections, and every one of them now markets that fact. The grades here separate signed hosting contracts from ambitions: an announcement is not a lease, and a megawatt in a press release is not revenue.
| Ticker | Company | Exposure | Why it is here | Price | Day | Market cap | Next earnings | Our coverage |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| RIOT | Riot Platforms, Inc. | Significant | Signed a 20-year, 191 MW AI hosting lease at its Rockdale campus carrying $9.1 billion of base contracted revenue, the largest signed miner-to-data-center conversion so far. Mining is still the business it runs today. | $19.83 | -5.48% | $7.4B | Oct 29, 2026 | 13 |
| GLXY | Galaxy Digital Inc. | Significant | Crypto financial services firm whose Helios campus lease to CoreWeave is one of the marquee miner-site-to-AI conversions. | $23.64 | +0.72% | $13.9B | Oct 20, 2026 | 1 |
| WULF | TeraWulf Inc. | Significant | Miner converting sites to AI hosting, with contracted deals ramping alongside a still-live bitcoin business. | $15.64 | -4.92% | $7.8B | - | 27 |
| CIFR | Cipher Digital Inc. | Significant | Bitcoin miner with AI hosting agreements emerging on top of the mining base rather than replacing it yet. | $15.77 | -8.40% | $6.5B | Nov 2, 2026 | 19 |
| HUT | Hut 8 Corp. | Significant | Runs a power-first platform and has pushed into AI hosting, with its bitcoin mining now held through a majority-owned arm. | $80.86 | -8.79% | $10.0B | Nov 4, 2026 | 3 |
| BTDR | Bitdeer Technologies Group | Significant | Mining-rig maker and self-miner building a GPU cloud line on top of its power portfolio. | $11.37 | +9.01% | $3.1B | Nov 9, 2026 | 10 |
| HIVE | HIVE Digital Technologies Ltd | Significant | Miner standing up a GPU cloud arm alongside its bitcoin production. | $3.03 | -3.19% | $831M | Nov 12, 2026 | 17 |
| CLSK | CleanSpark, Inc. | Indirect | Pure bitcoin miner today. Analysts flag its power portfolio as convertible to AI hosting, but there is no contracted AI revenue yet. | $11.98 | -4.92% | $3.1B | - | 27 |
| MARA | MARA Holdings, Inc. | Indirect | One of the largest bitcoin miners. AI hosting remains exploratory rather than contracted. | $11.26 | +0.99% | $4.3B | Nov 4, 2026 | 4 |
Landlords
The listed owners of the buildings. AI demand is a growth layer on top of large, diversified colocation businesses, which is exactly why their exposure is graded lower than the operators above.
| Ticker | Company | Exposure | Why it is here | Price | Day | Market cap | Next earnings | Our coverage |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| EQIX | Equinix, Inc. | Significant | The largest listed data center owner. AI capacity is a named growth driver inside a broad colocation and interconnection business. | $1065.39 | -1.59% | $105.1B | Oct 28, 2026 | 5 |
| DLR | Digital Realty Trust, Inc. | Significant | Hyperscale-heavy data center landlord where AI leasing is a growing share of new bookings. | $190.62 | -1.89% | $71.8B | Oct 22, 2026 | 7 |
Servers and racks
Someone has to turn pallets of accelerators into working systems. These companies build, integrate and support the AI servers that fill the buildings, a high-volume, thinner-margin business than the chips inside.
| Ticker | Company | Exposure | Why it is here | Price | Day | Market cap | Next earnings | Our coverage |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SMCI | Super Micro Computer, Inc. | Direct | AI server systems are the business. Ships accelerator racks at volume and rises and falls with that shipment rate. | $37.24 | +2.03% | $24.1B | Nov 3, 2026 | 10 |
| DELL | Dell Technologies Inc. | Significant | One of the largest AI server builders by revenue, inside a much larger PC and enterprise IT business. | $442.08 | +1.68% | $285.6B | Sep 1, 2026 | 19 |
| HPE | Hewlett Packard Enterprise Comp | Significant | AI systems and supercomputing franchise inside a diversified enterprise hardware company. | $53.45 | +1.06% | $70.8B | Sep 2, 2026 | 3 |
| CLS | Celestica, Inc. | Significant | Builds hyperscale racks and networking hardware as an outsourced manufacturer for the biggest AI buyers. | $296.55 | -1.80% | $37.4B | Oct 26, 2026 | 0 |
Power, cooling and construction
Every megawatt a data center draws has to be distributed, conditioned, backed up and turned into heat somewhere. This tier sells what the buildout physically consumes, and it keeps earning on retrofits after the shell is up.
| Ticker | Company | Exposure | Why it is here | Price | Day | Market cap | Next earnings | Our coverage |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| VRT | Vertiv Holdings, LLC | Direct | Power distribution and thermal management for data centers is the core business. The reference equipment name for this theme. | $261.95 | -1.01% | $100.8B | Oct 21, 2026 | 17 |
| ETN | Eaton Corporation, PLC | Significant | Electrical equipment giant where data centers have become the fastest-growing end market, inside a broad industrial portfolio. | $419.20 | +0.94% | $162.8B | Nov 3, 2026 | 5 |
| GEV | GE Vernova Inc. | Significant | Gas turbines and grid equipment. Data center load growth is a named driver of its order book on both the generation and transmission side. | $956.85 | -0.95% | $254.8B | Oct 28, 2026 | 17 |
| MOD | Modine Manufacturing Company | Significant | Thermal management company whose data center cooling segment has become its growth engine as rack densities climb. | $197.68 | +3.64% | $10.5B | Oct 27, 2026 | 1 |
| PWR | Quanta Services, Inc. | Significant | Builds the electrical infrastructure, substations, transmission and site power that connect new campuses to the grid. | $639.34 | -3.49% | $96.1B | Oct 29, 2026 | 2 |
| STRL | Sterling Infrastructure, Inc. | Significant | Site work and e-infrastructure contractor for which data center construction is the stated growth engine. | $516.81 | -0.71% | $15.8B | Nov 2, 2026 | 1 |
| AGX | Argan, Inc. | Significant | Engineering and construction firm building the gas-fired power plants that increasingly get planned alongside large AI campuses. | $501.63 | -2.89% | $7.0B | Sep 2, 2026 | 7 |
Exposure grades are our own judgment, defined in the methodology below. Market cap is unavailable from our quote source for a small number of symbols and is left blank rather than estimated. “Our coverage” is the number of articles we have published on that company.
Who leads
The buildout has different leaders at each layer, and the biggest builders of all are not investable through this theme.
| Company | How to buy it | Position in the market |
|---|---|---|
| The hyperscalers | MSFT, AMZN, GOOGL, META | Build and own more AI data center capacity than everyone else combined, for their own use. They set the demand every company on this page lives on, but the buildout is a cost to them, not revenue, which is why they are not constituents. |
| CoreWeave | US (CRWV) | The largest of the listed GPU clouds and the bellwether for the operator tier. Its contract terms, customer concentration and financing costs are the cleanest read on the economics of renting AI compute. |
| Vertiv | US (VRT) | The reference pure play in data center power and cooling equipment. When the theme is on, it is the name institutional money reaches for first on the infrastructure side. |
| Equinix and Digital Realty | US (EQIX, DLR) | The two big listed landlords. Slower and steadier than the operators: long leases and investment-grade tenants, with AI demand arriving as a growth layer rather than a transformation. |
What drives this group
The variables that decide whether these companies have a good year. Mechanisms rather than forecasts.
1. Hyperscaler capital spending
A handful of companies, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta and a few AI labs, fund most of the buildout, and they reset their capital spending plans quarterly.
Why it matters: Every tier of this page is a derivative of those budgets. A guidance change at one hyperscaler reaches the operators, the landlords, the server builders and the equipment vendors within days, which is why the group trades together on capex headlines even though the businesses differ.
2. Power and interconnection
New sites need generation capacity and a grid connection, and both are queued years out. Permits and interconnection agreements lead construction by long lead times.
Why it matters: Electricity, not chips or capital, has become the binding constraint on how fast capacity can be added. A blocked or delayed interconnection does not cancel demand, it relocates it, but the delay compresses the growth rate the whole group is priced on. Our AI bubble index tracks exactly this gap between announced and permitted capacity.
3. Contract quality: announced, signed, effective
The buildout runs on multi-year leases and take-or-pay capacity contracts, announced long before revenue flows, and sometimes contingent on financing or power that has not been secured yet.
Why it matters: Two announcements of the same dollar size can be wildly different assets. Whether a contract is signed or merely announced, whether it is effective or contingent, and how few counterparties stand behind it decide whether a backlog is future revenue or a press release. This is where the operators differ most, and it is the first thing to check on any lease headline.
4. The financing window
Sites are increasingly built with debt raised against those long-term leases, so the marginal project depends on credit markets staying open at workable rates.
Why it matters: Cheap project finance turns announcements into buildings; expensive finance quietly kills the marginal site without a headline. If this cycle ends the way credit cycles usually do, it will show up here first, which is why the financing terms in operator filings deserve more attention than the gigawatt numbers in their press releases.
5. Rack density and the cooling transition
Each accelerator generation draws more power per rack, pushing sites from air cooling toward liquid cooling and heavier electrical distribution.
Why it matters: Density growth means the equipment vendors get paid twice: once on new construction and again retrofitting the existing fleet. It shifts value toward thermal and electrical suppliers even when the number of new buildings disappoints, which makes this tier the steadier way to hold the theme.
Recent SEC filings
| Filed | Ticker | Form | Company |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 21, 2026 | CRWV | 4 | CoreWeave, Inc. — PRIMARY DOCUMENT |
| Aug 21, 2026 | CRWV | 4 | CoreWeave, Inc. — PRIMARY DOCUMENT |
| Aug 21, 2026 | CRWV | 4 | CoreWeave, Inc. — PRIMARY DOCUMENT |
| Aug 21, 2026 | CRWV | 4 | CoreWeave, Inc. — PRIMARY DOCUMENT |
| Aug 21, 2026 | CRWV | 4 | CoreWeave, Inc. — PRIMARY DOCUMENT |
| Aug 20, 2026 | NBIS | 6-K | Nebius Group N.V. — FORM 6-K |
| Aug 20, 2026 | HIVE | 4/A | HIVE Digital Technologies Ltd. — AMENDED STATEMENT OF CHANGES IN BENEFICIAL OWNERSHIP OF SECURITIES |
| Aug 20, 2026 | EQIX | 4 | EQUINIX INC — PRIMARY DOCUMENT |
| Aug 20, 2026 | EQIX | 144 | EQUINIX INC |
| Aug 19, 2026 | SMCI | 4 | Super Micro Computer, Inc. — FORM 4 |
| Aug 19, 2026 | SMCI | 4 | Super Micro Computer, Inc. — FORM 4 |
| Aug 19, 2026 | SMCI | 4 | Super Micro Computer, Inc. — FORM 4 |
Our recent coverage
- The densest AI racks need liquid cooling. Vertiv (VRT), nVent (NVT) and Modine (MOD) sell the infrastructure. Aug 23, 2026
- CoreWeave (CRWV) signed a multibillion-dollar AI cloud deal with Hudson River Trading, but neither company disclosed the terms. Aug 20, 2026
- Nebius (NBIS) is selling $4.5 billion of convertible notes, and the stock dropped about 9% on the news Aug 19, 2026
- Four states now publish how much announced data center demand they actually expect. All four throw out most of it. Aug 19, 2026
- AI GPU arrives in weeks. The power gear behind it takes years: GE Vernova (GEV), Vertiv (VRT), Eaton (ETN), Quanta (PWR) and Powell (POWL) Aug 16, 2026
- Nebius (NBIS) soars 27% as explosive AI demand burns Michael Burry's short Aug 12, 2026
- CoreWeave (CRWV) crushed earnings and Cramer's IREN call aged well. Then Nebius (NBIS) crushed it too. Aug 11, 2026
- Riot Platforms (RIOT) postponed its earnings call. Six days later it announced a $9.1 billion AI lease Aug 10, 2026
How this list is built
A company is on this page when AI data center demand is a named, disclosed driver of its business, in one of four roles: operating AI compute capacity, owning and leasing the buildings, integrating the servers and racks inside them, or supplying the power, cooling and construction that make a site run. We grade how direct that exposure is rather than presenting every name as a pure play, because most of them are not.
- Operators: GPU clouds and AI-hosting companies whose revenue is the capacity itself, including former bitcoin miners that converted their power-secured sites.
- Landlords: listed data center owners leasing space and power to AI tenants.
- Servers and racks: companies building and integrating the AI systems that fill the buildings.
- Power, cooling and construction: companies supplying the electrical equipment, thermal management and site engineering the buildout consumes.
Exposure grades
- Direct. The theme is a primary revenue driver. A change in it changes this company's year.
- Significant. Named by the company as a real driver, but a minority of revenue.
- Indirect. Benefits from the theme inside a diversified business. Do not read it as a pure play.
What is deliberately not here
- The hyperscalers, Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Meta, build and own more AI data center capacity than anyone. They are still not on this list, because they are the demand side: the buildout is a cost on their income statements, not a revenue line. They are covered on our company pages instead.
- Chipmakers are the other obvious omission. What goes inside the racks is its own supply chain, covered on our AI chip pages and our HBM memory page.
- Power generation, the utilities, nuclear developers and independent power producers that sell the electricity, is deliberately held out as its own theme. It shares one driver with this page and nothing else.
- Networking and optics vendors sit between our sector themes and will get their own page rather than a token row here.
- Bitcoin miners appear only when AI hosting is a disclosed, material part of the story, graded by whether the contracts are signed or still ambitions. Miners with nothing beyond an announcement stay in our stock directory instead.
Prices, market caps and earnings dates come from our market data provider and refresh through the trading day. Filings come straight from SEC EDGAR. Membership and exposure grades are reviewed by us as companies change what they disclose, and changes are recorded in the page history.
Use this data
Our figures are free to reuse in articles, newsletters, and research with attribution and a link back to this page. How every number is computed: methodology. Current table as a file: download CSV.
Suggested citation: AIStockWire, “AI data center stocks,” aistockwire.com/sectors/ai-data-centers. Questions about the data: [email protected].
Related: HBM memory stocks · AI bubble index · AI infrastructure backlog tracker · CoreWeave (CRWV) company page · Vertiv (VRT) company page
Frequently asked questions
What are AI data center stocks?
AI data center stocks are the companies paid by the AI buildout: GPU clouds that operate accelerator capacity, listed landlords that own the buildings, server integrators that fill the racks, and the power, cooling and construction firms that make the sites work. The label covers very different risk profiles, from pure-play operators whose entire revenue is AI capacity to diversified industrials where data centers are one strong segment.
Which stocks benefit from AI data center power demand?
Inside this group, the most direct beneficiaries of the power problem are the electrical and thermal equipment makers, Vertiv, Eaton, GE Vernova and Modine, plus the builders like Quanta, Sterling and Argan that construct substations, transmission and on-site generation. The power producers themselves, the utilities and nuclear developers that sell the electricity, are a separate theme we cover on our energy pages.
Are Microsoft and Amazon AI data center stocks?
Not in the sense this page uses. The hyperscalers build and own more AI data center capacity than anyone, but they build it for themselves: the buildout is capital spending on their income statements, not a revenue line. Owning them is a bet on what the data centers eventually earn, not on the buildout itself.
Are bitcoin miners AI data center stocks?
Some are becoming so, and the test is contracted hosting revenue rather than announcements. Riot has signed a 20-year AI hosting lease at its Rockdale campus worth $9.1 billion in base rent, and Galaxy leased its Helios campus to CoreWeave; those are real conversions. TeraWulf, Cipher, Hut 8, Bitdeer and HIVE are at various stages of the same pivot. CleanSpark and MARA remain bitcoin miners first, with AI still at the ambition stage, which is why they carry a lower exposure grade on this page.
What is a neocloud?
A neocloud is a company that rents out GPU capacity without being one of the big general-purpose cloud providers. CoreWeave and Nebius are the listed examples, alongside former bitcoin miners like IREN, Core Scientific and Applied Digital that converted their power-secured sites into AI hosting. Their common trait is concentration: long contracts with a small number of customers, which is both the appeal and the risk.
Why is electricity the constraint on AI data centers?
Because generation and grid connections take years to add and the queues are long. Chips can be bought and buildings can go up in quarters, but a new site still needs a utility-scale power supply and an interconnection agreement, and those lead construction by years. That is why announced projects concentrate around existing power, why on-site gas generation keeps appearing in project plans, and why our AI bubble index tracks the gap between announced and permitted capacity.
Published for information only. Nothing here is investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security, and membership of this list is not an endorsement of any company on it.