Meet the AI Centurions.
While reporting a story on the extraordinary comeback at GE led by CEO Larry Culp, I was struck by the high-voltage stock performance of GE Vernova. What from the outside looks like the ultimate old economy stalwart, it was once a pillar of the world’s most famous conglomerate. But since it was spun off from GE in early 2024, it has zoomed from a starting market cap of $39 billion to hit $288 billion on July 21. In large part, it was the AI explosion that powered the moonshot. Turns out GE Vernova is not alone—there’s a whole cadre of old-line companies that have mined the AI boom to multiply their valuations many times, and sprinted to join the $100 billion-plus valuation club.
As a starting point, I went back three years to mid-July of 2023, the approximate point when hyperscalers began planning for big expansion in AI data centers, or later if the enterprise did a spinoff or went public more recently. The two criteria: Reaching that $100 billion market cap benchmark after beginning the race far back, and achieving annualized returns of at least 100%. The search revealed five especially notable examples in addition to GE Vernova. Four are effectively old-timers that like GE Vernova sell equipment to the hyperscalers: Seagate Technology, Vertiv, Western Digital, and Western’s recent spinoff, Sandisk. In the decade prior to the AI liftoff, they all they sat alongside the GE power unit in the underachiever category, registering tepid growth and weak profitability. Seagate and Western, the two that were publicly traded prior to the AI phenomenon, registered fairly flat share prices, and the original Vertiv franchise got axed by its parent for delivering chronically poor results.
