Global investment in AI data center infrastructure could reach $7 trillion by 2030, according to a McKinsey projection, and the companies supplying that buildout are already seeing the money show up in earnings. Schneider Electric, Vertiv, and Eaton all reported significant growth in the second quarter of 2026, with Schneider's North American sales up 23% and Vertiv raising its full-year net sales growth outlook to 31%.
The scale of the buildout is hard to overstate. Combined capital expenditures by six major hyperscalers - Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, Oracle, and SpaceX - are projected to exceed $1.3 trillion by 2027, according to S&P Global. Data centers are expected to account for 38% of net U.S. electricity consumption growth through 2037, according to NEMA, making power one of the biggest constraints on the industry's expansion.
Who's winning now
The earnings numbers tell the story. Schneider Electric reported record global revenue, driven by a 23% rise in North American sales. Vertiv's operating profit jumped 44%, and Eaton reported Electrical Americas orders up 41% with total electrical backlog rising 43%.
That surge is flowing through the reseller channel as well. Insight Enterprises reported a 65% increase in consolidated net earnings, while another value-added reseller, Connection, posted a 33.8% increase in net income.
Schneider sits squarely in the physical bottleneck of the AI boom, supplying the power distribution, switchgear, and cooling infrastructure required to bring increasingly dense AI computing capacity online.
"It's a great time to be in the data center business," said Steve Carlini, Chief Advocate of Data Centers and AI at Schneider Electric. "Ten years ago, data centers were much smaller. But now they all need - the big ones need - their own medium-voltage switchgear."
Power density is driving the demand
Carlini said Schneider expects installed data center capacity to reach about 200 gigawatts globally by 2030, roughly double today's approximately 100 gigawatts. McKinsey's broader forecast is even more aggressive, projecting global data center capacity could nearly triple by 2030.
The opportunity extends beyond simply constructing more data centers. AI is dramatically increasing the amount of electricity that must be delivered to each individual rack.
"We're going to see it almost doubling every year," Carlini said of expected rack density.
He pointed to Nvidia's infrastructure roadmap, with rack power moving from roughly 227 kilowatts toward 400 kilowatts as newer generations of AI systems arrive. "Once you get to the Rubin Ultra, the industry has to go into what's called high voltage DC power distribution, which is 800 volts," Carlini said.
Those escalating power requirements are forcing fundamental changes across data center design, from electrical distribution to cooling. Schneider has already deployed more than four gigawatts of liquid-cooling capacity, but that's going to increase rapidly now that Blackwell Ultras and Vera Rubins are all liquid-cooled, Carlini said.
Supply access is the new bottleneck
The shift increases the importance of the channel partners that design, source, integrate, and deploy that infrastructure. With power equipment and cooling systems becoming essential to bringing new AI capacity online, access to supply has become as important as access to computing chips.
Carlini said the numbers Schneider is seeing from large global internet companies are backed by customer commitments rather than long-range projections.
"They give us not only a forecast, but they give us purchase orders," Carlini said. "The demand for these data centers is actually there and there is no speculation about who is going to go into these facilities."
Why this matters for finance professionals
For investors and analysts, the key signal is that this demand is contractual, not speculative. When companies like Schneider cite purchase orders rather than forecasts, it suggests the revenue pipeline is more predictable than typical infrastructure cycles. The earnings reports from Vertiv, Eaton, and the reseller channel offer a way to track the AI buildout's financial health quarter by quarter - and the 41% to 51% growth rates in orders and operating profit indicate the cycle is still accelerating, not peaking.
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