Every gold rush produces two kinds of fortunes. 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.
That trade worked. 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.
Why chip fabs cannot run without pumps and gases
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.
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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.
What gets missed is that the fab side of the equation is a consumables business.
Pumps need service. Gases get consumed and reordered. Abatement systems require replacement parts on a schedule for as long as the plant is running.
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Cooling equipment, by contrast, largely gets sold once per build.
European makers of vacuum pumps, heat exchangers and specialty gases have become “lesser-known winners” of the AI boom, according to Bloomberg.
The order books tell a very different AI story
Atlas Copco (ATLCY), the Swedish industrial group whose Vacuum Technique division supplies pumps and exhaust management systems to chipmakers, posted organic order growth of 59% in that division in the second quarter.
Group orders hit a record 50.95 billion Swedish kronor. Demand “improved significantly, particularly from the semiconductor industry,” said Chief Executive Vagner Rego, according to a company statement.
When I ran the divisional numbers against the group total, one thing stood out.
Vacuum Technique represents roughly a quarter of Atlas Copco’s order intake but produced the overwhelming share of growth. The rest of the portfolio grew at ordinary industrial rates in the low teens.
Strip the semiconductor exposure out and this is a solid European machinery company. Leave it in and it is an AI stock that nobody files under AI.
Management is not treating this as a cycle to harvest. Chief Financial Officer Peter Kinnart said demand in the vacuum business is “very extraordinary,” and that some factories need to more than double output, according to Investing.com.
Linde (LIN) tells a parallel story on the gas side. Electronics sales rose 18% year over year in the second quarter, and the company’s contracted sale of gas backlog reached a record after a $1 billion U.S. contract to supply advanced node fabs.
“The electronics pipeline is looking healthy,” said Chief Executive Sanjiv Lamba, according to TradingView.
Here is the scoreboard for the quarter:
- Atlas Copco’s Vacuum Technique orders grew 59% organically, according to Atlas Copco
- Linde’s sale of gas backlog hit a record $8.1 billion, according to Linde
- Linde’s total project backlog reached $11 billion, according to Linde
- ASML (ASML) plans to add 30% to its 2026 low NA EUV capacity for 2027, according to ASML
- Vertiv grew second quarter sales 24% and raised guidance, yet shares fell, according to Morningstar
What owning the boring layer actually costs you
The case for these names is not that they are cheap. It is that they sell into fab construction schedules locked in years ahead, and then keep selling parts and gas for the life of the plant.
That is a different revenue shape from selling a rack of cooling equipment once.
My analysis of the two business models comes down to duration.
A cooling order is a project with a delivery date. A gas contract is closer to an annuity with a fab attached, and Linde’s backlog represents contracted revenue on plants that have not been built yet.
That is why I weigh backlog quality more heavily than headline growth in this corner of the market. Growth tells you what just happened. Backlog tells you what has already been signed.
Now the honest part. Atlas Copco’s vacuum business shrank last year before this year’s surge, so the cyclicality is real, not theoretical.
Most of these companies also trade in Stockholm, Paris and Zurich, reaching U.S. investors through American depositary receipts with thinner volume and currency exposure attached. Your S&P 500index fund owns almost none of this.
Domestic investors do have entry points. Linde lists on the Nasdaq, and Ingersoll Rand (IR) sells vacuum and gas handling systems out of Davidson, N.C.
Entegris (ENTG) supplies the materials and filtration that keep fab chemistry clean.
None of the three is a pure play on this theme, which cuts both ways. You get diversification and you get dilution of the exact exposure you were shopping for.
Fidelity’s managers have been building positions in the electrical and mechanical layer of this buildout, as TheStreet reported in December.
The trade that survives an AI spending pause
Ask what happens if AI model demand disappoints. Chip design cycles turn fast, and Intel’s cheaper inference push shows how quickly the architecture argument can shift.
Fabs do not turn fast. A plant approved in 2026 gets built through 2028 and runs for two decades, consuming pumps and gases the entire time.
That is the quiet argument for owning the layer below the layer everyone already found. It is not a bet on which model wins. It is a bet that the buildings keep running.
The names are hard to pronounce and harder to explain at a dinner party. Their order books do not care.
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