AI bubble has sucked in France and Germany, too

IF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE is indeed a bubble, it’s been inflating a lot of companies in places well beyond the tech-bro heartlands of the US.

- LIONEL LAURENT

Europe might be an Al laggard, but some of its grand old industrial names have been riding the boom as merrily as an Nvidia Corp. shareholder (at least before this week’s so far minor market correction.)

The AI race for virtual godhood has been running into human-scale bottlenecks such as land, labour, and electricity. And Europe’s unsexy industrial champions including France’s Legrand and Schneider Electric (both founded in the 1800s) have been eagerly offering the picks and shovels for the data-centre gold rush. Think server racks, heat-dissipating coolers, power-management tools, and all the other stuff that’s essential to a spending splurge that might add up to $7 trillion by 2030. Along with Germany’s Siemens and Switzerland’s ABB, Europe has its own “Data Centre Four”, which is being pump primed by the Magnificent Seven.

Even the drag of Donald Trump’s tariffs hasn’t stopped the shares of Legrand—based in central France—from outperforming Nvidia’s in 2025. A century on from Le-grand’s pivot to electricity, when it crafted light switches from porcelain, it gets about a fifth of its revenue from kit such as rear-door heat exchangers used to cool servers. Most of it is sold to Alphabet, Amazon.com, and other Big Tech hyperscalers.