In every gold rush, the real money isn't made by the prospectors, it's made by whoever sells them the shovels. The AI boom works the same way, and it isn't just one sector. A whole layer of ‘unglamorous’ businesses is cashing in, no matter which chatbot or chipmaker ends up winning.
Start with electricity. Constellation Energy, the largest nuclear power producer in the US, has rallied hard over the past two years simply because data centres need guaranteed, round-the-clock power and Constellation already owns the plants that can provide it. Microsoft is even paying to bring an old nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island back online, betting on the power itself rather than on any particular AI model running on top of it.
Then there's memory. SK Hynix, which makes the specialised memory chips that let AI models actually process information fast enough to be useful, just priced a blockbuster Nasdaq listing even as broader tech stocks wobbled on Middle East tensions, a sign investors see memory chip demand as more durable than the AI hype cycle around any one company.
And underneath all of it is copper. Every data centre needs it for cabling, transformers and cooling, and Morgan Stanley expects data centre copper demand alone to rise from 760,000 tonnes this year to 1.3 million tonnes by 2028. Mines take years to build, so miners are buying existing supply rather than waiting on new production to catch up.
The common thread is that none of these businesses need to guess which AI company wins. They get paid either way. The risk, of course, is that they've priced in a demand curve that assumes AI spending keeps compounding at its current pace, and if that slows even slightly, some of this capacity gets built for a boom that doesn't fully arrive.
Australia sits inside more of this than people realise. AGL expects data centre electricity demand to jump seven-fold, Origin says data centres are already its biggest driver of electricity sales growth, and BHP and Rio Tinto sit right at the base of the global copper supply chain feeding this thing. Australia doesn’t have a fancy generative AI platform nor chipmakers, but we have a fair few shovels cashing in on the AI boom.
