Beyond Nvidia: Three Companies Positioned to Capitalize on the AI Data Center Surge

AI Infrastructure Spending Is Accelerating — And It's Not Just About Chips

Nvidia's latest earnings report underscored just how rapidly AI infrastructure investment is expanding. The chipmaker's data center segment posted a staggering 92% year-over-year revenue increase last quarter, prompting CFO Colette Kress to declare on the company's May earnings call that "the build-out of AI factories is accelerating." While Nvidia often dominates the conversation around AI hardware, analysts note that the broader infrastructure buildout is creating substantial opportunities across networking, cloud services, and power management.

The driving force behind this spending wave is the growing complexity of AI workloads — particularly agentic AI systems that require massive, coordinated computing resources. Data centers are evolving rapidly, and the companies supplying the connective tissue around chips may prove just as critical as the chip manufacturers themselves.

Astera Labs: High-Speed Networking at the Heart of the Data Center

Astera Labs (NASDAQ: ALAB) has emerged as a key supplier of high-speed networking hardware that enables rapid data movement between chips within data centers. Over the past year, shares have climbed roughly 357%, though analysts suggest the company's growth trajectory could support continued appreciation.

The company has meaningfully diversified its product lineup over the past three years. Its Scorpio smart fabric switches, launched in 2024, already accounted for 15% of total revenue in 2025 — a notable contribution for a relatively new product line. Additionally, Astera's COSMOS software platform integrates deeply into customer systems, providing diagnostic services that raise switching costs and help cement long-term relationships.

First-quarter revenue nearly doubled year-over-year to $308 million, and analysts project adjusted earnings growth of 69% for the full year, with high double-digit growth expected to continue beyond that. The stock currently trades at approximately 134 times forward earnings — a premium valuation that reflects both the growth expectations and the execution risk embedded in that outlook. Data suggests that if AI infrastructure spending were to decelerate meaningfully, the stock's elevated multiple would face significant pressure.

CoreWeave: GPU-Optimized Cloud Capacity With a Massive Backlog

CoreWeave (NASDAQ: CRWV) operates a cloud services platform specifically designed for GPU-intensive generative AI workloads, offering enterprises a way to access high-performance computing without the capital burden of building it themselves. First-quarter revenue more than doubled year-over-year, reaching nearly $2.1 billion.

The company has expanded its data center footprint to over 50 facilities, demonstrating an ability to get AI-ready infrastructure online within weeks — a speed advantage that has attracted major clients including OpenAI and Anthropic. CoreWeave's $100 billion revenue backlog signals substantial contracted demand ahead, and analysts project revenue could approach $40 billion by 2028.

Customer concentration remains a notable risk factor. A pullback in spending from any of its largest clients could weigh materially on results. However, the company is actively diversifying its customer base — financial services clients now represent 10% of that backlog, indicating expansion beyond its core AI-native customer set. Performance data indicates that if CoreWeave trades around 10 times sales as revenue scales toward analyst estimates, its $53 billion current market cap could look considerably different by the end of the decade.

Vertiv Holding: Power and Cooling for an Energy-Hungry AI Era

Vertiv Holding (NYSE: VRT) sits at the intersection of two pressing challenges in AI infrastructure: power delivery and thermal management. As chip density inside data centers rises, so does the demand for sophisticated cooling and power management systems — Vertiv's core business.

Revenue growth accelerated to 30% year-over-year in the first quarter, and management's full-year guidance calls for further acceleration to 34% growth, targeting $13.8 billion in annual revenue. Beyond top-line momentum, the company's deep integration into customer operations creates meaningful competitive insulation. Vertiv is targeting an adjusted operating margin above 27% by 2030, driven by cost leverage, service revenue growth, and operational efficiency gains.

Analysts expect earnings to compound at an annualized rate of approximately 32% over the next several years. The energy constraints facing AI infrastructure — electricity supply remains a genuine bottleneck for data center expansion — position power-efficiency specialists like Vertiv as increasingly critical partners for hyperscalers and cloud providers looking to do more with limited power budgets.

What Investors Should Watch

The common thread across all three companies is their exposure to the sustained, multi-year capital investment cycle in AI infrastructure. Each occupies a different niche — networking, cloud services, and power management — but all benefit from the same fundamental trend: data centers are getting bigger, more complex, and more power-hungry.

Key variables to monitor include the pace of AI infrastructure spending from major hyperscalers, any shifts in customer concentration for CoreWeave, Vertiv's margin execution as it scales, and whether Astera Labs can maintain its product development momentum in a competitive networking market. The trajectory of agentic AI adoption will likely serve as the broader bellwether for the entire space.