The landscape of corporate giants is undergoing a quiet but profound transformation, with several established companies leveraging the artificial intelligence boom to achieve unprecedented market valuations. Among them, GE Vernova stands out, having ascended from a market capitalization of $39 billion in early 2024 to an impressive $288 billion by July 21. This remarkable growth is not an isolated incident; it reflects a broader trend where companies, once considered underperformers in the traditional economy, are finding new life by catering to the burgeoning demands of AI infrastructure.
This shift has created a new class of corporate powerhouses, which some are calling the “AI Centurions.” These are firms that have not only surpassed the $100 billion market cap threshold but have also delivered annualized returns exceeding 100% since mid-2023, a period marking the initial surge in AI data center planning. Beyond GE Vernova, five other companies epitomize this phenomenon: Seagate Technology, Vertiv, Western Digital, Western Digital’s spinoff Sandisk, and AppLovin. Many of these, like GE Vernova, are suppliers to the hyperscalers building out the vast AI data centers, providing essential components ranging from advanced cooling systems to high-capacity storage solutions.
Consider the case of Vertiv, a company once described by its former parent, Emerson Electric, as a disliked business. Under the leadership of Dave Cote, a GE veteran, Vertiv, acquired in 2020 for $4 billion, has reinvented itself. Cote, despite not being an “AI savant,” recognized the opportunity in digital data infrastructure. Collaborating with Nvidia, Vertiv developed a novel cooling system that uses a water and glycol coolant directed over chips, a significant departure from traditional air cooling methods. This innovation addresses the critical need to manage the intense heat generated by high-density data centers, ensuring optimal performance and longevity for processors. The company’s sales rose 31% to $10.2 billion in 2025, with operating profit soaring six-fold to $2.1 billion, signaling a dramatic turnaround.
Similarly, Seagate Technology, a stalwart in hard disk drive manufacturing since 1978, faced declining fortunes post-pandemic. However, the AI revolution offered a lifeline. In early 2024, Seagate introduced its Mozaic platform with HAMR technology, which uses lasers to heat disks during data writing, enabling unprecedented data packing density. This breakthrough significantly increased storage capacity on standard 3.5-inch disks, making exabyte-scale storage more cost-effective and space-efficient for data centers. The impact was immediate, with Seagate shipping 199 exabytes of memory to data centers in its third fiscal quarter, a 39% year-over-year increase, driving revenues up by 44% and gross margins to 47%.
Western Digital, a direct competitor to Seagate, also capitalized on the AI surge by re-engineering its hard drives for massive data center workloads. The demand for storage has now outstripped supply, leading to price increases of up to 50% since early last year, with Western Digital reportedly sold out through 2026. This confluence of rising volumes and pricing power transformed a $1.7 billion loss in fiscal year 2023 into a $6.4 billion profit over the past four quarters. Western Digital’s strategic move to spin off its solid-state drive (SSD) business into Sandisk in February 2025 proved equally prescient. While hard disk drives (HDDs) are crucial for “warm” and “cold” data storage, SSDs provide the “flash” or “hot” storage necessary for real-time applications and active databases, critical for AI’s demanding inference and training workloads. The spin-off has seen Sandisk achieve an astounding 170x growth in just 18 months, boasting a valuation over $60 billion larger than its former parent.
GE Vernova, the energy unit spun off from General Electric in April 2024, represents another striking example. While the revival in global energy demand provided a tailwind, it was the explosive growth of AI data centers that delivered the decisive push. These facilities require substantial power, often leading hyperscalers and co-location providers to install natural gas turbines on-site. GE Vernova, a leader in both heavy-duty and aeroderivative turbines, now powers major AI projects like xAI’s Stargate and OpenAI’s Colossus One. Last year, approximately 10% of GE Vernova’s $59 billion in orders stemmed from data centers, a figure projected to jump to one-fourth of a much larger total in 2026. This intense demand has outpaced production, resulting in rising prices and robust profitability.
The sixth member of this exclusive club, AppLovin, operates in a different segment. As an AdTech platform, it directly benefits from the AI-driven acceleration in processing capacity. The enhanced data-crunching capabilities, powered by GPUs from companies like Nvidia, enable AppLovin to excel in marketing and monetizing mobile applications and games. These six companies, once considered slow-moving or struggling, have collectively seen their combined valuation skyrocket from $90 billion to nearly $1 trillion since mid-July 2023. Their annualized stock gains, averaging 145%, far outpace those of even the “Magnificent Seven” tech giants. This dramatic resurgence highlights how foundational technologies, often overlooked during periods of rapid innovation, can become indispensable when a new technological wave, like AI, demands their specialized capabilities. However, their continued success hinges on the sustained, massive investment in AI infrastructure, a spending trend that has exploded from $35 billion in 2023 to an anticipated $650 billion run-rate this year, with projections reaching $1.0 to $1.1 trillion by 2027. Any significant slowdown could challenge the market’s high expectations embedded in their current valuations.
