There are the people who find the gold, and there are the people who sell them the shovels. History remembers the first group and quietly enriches the second. The artificial intelligence (AI) buildout has followed that script almost to the letter.
Investors who missed Nvidia (NVDA) crowded into what Wall Street calls the picks and shovels trade, buying the companies that deliver power and cooling to data centers rather than the chips humming inside them. Then it got crowded, and crowded trades punish disappointment. Vertiv Holdings (VRT), the largest pure play in data center thermal management, trades well below the all-time closing high of $376.15 it set on May 14, according to Macrotrends.
So the money has moved again, one layer further down the stack. Investors hunting the next round of AI winners are now buying the companies that make vacuum pumps, heat exchangers and ultra high purity gases, the deeply unglamorous inputs without which a chip fab is an empty building. A modern semiconductor fab is essentially a very expensive vacuum.
Etching and deposition steps happen in chambers pumped down to near space conditions, and the exhaust from those chambers is toxic enough to require its own abatement equipment. Feeding those chambers takes nitrogen, argon, helium and a long list of specialty gases delivered at purity levels measured in parts per billion. None of that shows up in a Nvidia keynote.
All of it shows up in the capital budget of every fab under construction. Bank of America sends blunt message to Nvidia stock investors Goldman Sachs just answered the biggest question about Al ASML's recent dip gives rare opening for Al investors The scale is set upstream. ASML said its order intake stayed very strong through the first half and that it is planning roughly 30% more low numerical aperture extreme ultraviolet capacity for 2027, according to a company statement.
Every one of those lithography tools lands inside a fab that needs pumps, abatement and gas lines wrapped around it. The same logic runs through the data center itself. Cooling is the piece investors already understand, and my colleagues have covered how hyperscalers are racing to lock in chiller capacity years ahead of need.
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