The Data Centre Boom: five companies, one build-out
The largest capital-expenditure cycle in corporate history — and the five operators the spending can’t route around, read through the framework, with the call left to you.
Every few decades, the economy rewires itself around one enormous project — the railroads, the highways, the internet. Right now it’s the data centre, the physical plumbing of AI, and by most third-party estimates the industry will spend on the order of $450 billion on it in 2026 alone. The easy question — is the build-out real? — answers itself. The useful one is which companies the money can’t route around, and what you’d be paying to own them. That is a theme.
Here is the Data Centre Boom read through the framework — five operators the spending has to flow through: NVIDIA, TSMC, Broadcom, Comfort Systems and Eaton.
The field · T. Rowe Price — a fertile field with years of earnings growth still ahead; GARPify starts here, not with a ticker.
The basket · Lynch — five businesses you can actually understand, each dominant in one layer of the stack: chips, fabs, networking, cooling, power.
Quality · Buffett & Collins — structural quality, not a momentum trade: median return on capital near 31%, free-cash-flow margins near 28%.
Sentiment · Howard Marks — the basket trades near 41× trailing earnings, about 3% above its ten-year average of 36×: optimism, but short of euphoria.
Price discipline · Lynch & Buffett — on a forward view the median PEG is near 0.63, which the framework reads reasonable — a rule you can check, not our verdict.
The risk · Munger — invert: the whole reading holds only if the forward growth proves roughly right, so study what would break it.
GARPify is impersonal financial research and education, not personalized investment advice. Companies named are subjects of our research, not recommendations. Market figures are third-party estimates shown for context.