Real manufacturers, real orders, and how to find the next company riding this wave
Data centers don’t run on chips alone. Every new AI campus needs cooling systems, backup power, structural steel, and enough electrical equipment to run a small city, and manufacturers that spent decades supplying entirely different industries are finding a second customer base almost overnight.
This is what makes the AI infrastructure boom a genuinely findable opportunity rather than just a headline. The demand is real, it is landing in specific, identifiable industrial categories, and the companies benefiting from it are sitting in a database today, whether you sell to them directly or serve the businesses that supply them.
The Numbers Behind the Boom
- U.S. data center construction starts reached $77.7 billion in 2025, a 190% increase over 2024, after climbing from $14.9 billion in 2023 (American Industrial Magazine).
- 2026 is accelerating even faster than 2025 did: year-to-date spending through April hit $49.5 billion, nearly four times the $13.6 billion spent over the same months a year earlier (ConstructConnect).
- Power infrastructure starts, the transformers, switchgear, and generation equipment data centers depend on, rose 21.2% in the first quarter of 2026 alone and are forecast to finish the year more than 30% above 2025 (ConstructConnect).
- Wood Mackenzie projects the electrical equipment market tied to U.S. data centers will roughly double, from $33 billion in 2025 to $66 billion by 2030 (Yahoo Finance).
- The supply chain runs deep enough to bottleneck itself: large power transformers now carry average lead times of roughly 128 weeks, and demand for generator step-up units is up 274% since 2019 (Power Magazine).
Real Companies Already Riding This Wave
None of this is abstract. It is already showing up in earnings reports, SEC filings, trade press, and IndustrySelect’s own monthly coverage of new manufacturing announcements, at companies that never built their businesses around data centers in the first place.
Cooling and Thermal Management
Southeastern Hose, a Georgia manufacturer of corrugated metal hoses, spent its history supplying the steel and petrochemical industries. According to Construction Dive, those same hoses also serve a second purpose providing cooling and exhaust for data centers, and orders that started as a trickle turned into a deluge last year, with another swell of growth since January, per VP of Operations Trey Travis.
AAON, an HVAC equipment manufacturer, saw its BASX brand, which makes air-side and liquid cooling systems for data centers, more than double its revenue with backlog up 141.3%, according to the company’s own 2026 earnings disclosure. To keep pace, AAON expanded its manufacturing footprint by roughly 25% and more than doubled production capacity for data center equipment at a newly renovated 787,000-square-foot Memphis facility.
Power, Backup, and Electrical Infrastructure
Generac, the generator manufacturer best known for home backup power, has been expanding specifically to meet data center demand. In January, the company acquired a new facility in Sussex, Wisconsin to expand production of the commercial and industrial power products used in data center backup systems, with CEO Aaron Jagdfeld citing McKinsey’s projection that global data center capacity will more than triple by 2030, according to IndustrySelect’s coverage of the announcement. That expansion is already showing up in results: Generac reported second-quarter 2026 sales up 11% to $1.17 billion and pointed to a rapidly increasing data center backlog as a driver of growth heading into 2027, according to its own quarterly results.
Virginia Transformer Corp is investing $40 million to expand a Georgia facility, aiming to boost output by 70%, part of a wider wave of transformer manufacturers racing to add capacity as demand for grid and data center transformers outpaces supply, according to Power Magazine’s reporting on Wood Mackenzie’s transformer market analysis.
Electric Research and Manufacturing Cooperative, known as ERMCO, makes distribution transformers and electrical equipment. The company announced a new manufacturing facility in Maricopa County, Arizona expected to create more than 500 jobs and strengthen domestic distribution transformer production, with CEO Tim Mills describing the goal simply as powering the grid and powering progress, according to IndustrySelect’s coverage of the announcement.
Eaton, the power management company, announced a new 370,000-square-foot facility in Bellevue, Nebraska to produce medium-voltage switchgear for data centers and industrial power systems. The expansion is expected to create more than 200 jobs, part of what Eaton executive Mike Yelton described as a broader push to expand the company’s U.S. manufacturing footprint, according to IndustrySelect’s coverage of the announcement.
DCL America shows how far the ripple effects reach. The company makes emissions control systems, including catalytic silencers and catalyst components, for applications like gas compression and power generation. It completed a second expansion of its Houston manufacturing footprint, bringing total space to roughly 60,000 square feet, tied directly to growing data center demand for on-site power generation equipment, according to IndustrySelect’s coverage of the announcement.
Connectivity and Networking
Corning entered a multiyear agreement worth up to $6 billion to supply Meta with optical fiber, cable, and connectivity solutions for data center buildouts, with Meta serving as anchor customer for an expanded optical cable facility in Hickory, North Carolina. The deal underscores Corning’s role as a domestic supplier of the network hardware data centers depend on, according to IndustrySelect’s coverage of the announcement.
Applied Optoelectronics expanded its Houston-area manufacturing footprint by roughly 388,000 square feet across two new buildings in Pearland, Texas, to produce optical networking products for high-speed AI data center connectivity. Founder, Chairman, and CEO Dr. Thompson Lin said demand for optical connectivity in data centers has exceeded expectations, according to IndustrySelect’s coverage of the announcement.
Structural and Component Manufacturing
Timken, an Ohio-based maker of engineered steel bearings, has found data centers adding another leg of growth on top of its traditional aerospace and defense customers. CEO Lucian Boldea has said data centers require massive buildings, roads, and gas turbines, all of which need Timken’s products, according to Yahoo Finance’s reporting on the broader factory supply chain ripple effect from data center construction.
The Categories Worth Targeting Right Now
The anecdotes above are not outliers. They map onto specific, filterable categories already in the data. According to MNI:
- SIC 305, Hose, Belting, Gaskets and Packing: NAICS codes 326220 and 33991
- SIC 356, General Industrial Machinery: covers pumps, blowers, and the cooling equipment categories AAON’s BASX brand competes in. NAICS codes 3561-3569
- SIC 351, Engines and Turbines: covers generators and backup power equipment, Generac’s category. NAICS codes 333611, 333618, and 336390
- SIC 362, Electrical Industrial Apparatus: covers transformers and switchgear, Virginia Transformer, ERMCO, and Eaton’s category. NAICS codes 335312, 335991, 335314
- SIC 366, Communications Equipment: covers the fiber optic and networking hardware categories Corning and Applied Optoelectronics compete in. NAICS codes 334210, 334418, 334220, 334515, and 334920
- SIC 344, Fabricated Structural Metal Products: covers the structural steel needed for the data center buildouts themselves. NAICS codes 332312, 332321, 332322, 332323, 332311, 332114.
Where This Demand Is Landing
Data center investment is concentrating in a handful of states:
For full-year 2025, Virginia led all states in data center construction funding at $15.3 billion, followed by Louisiana at $15 billion, Mississippi at $13.9 billion, and Texas at $13.4 billion, according to Equipment World’s reporting on ConstructConnect data.
How to Build the List
Three filters turn these categories into a working target list rather than a research exercise. Start with SIC code to isolate the category. Layer in geography, using the state and regional concentration outlined above to prioritize manufacturers located closest to where the demand is landing.
Finally, filter by employee count to prioritize small and midsize manufacturers, the companies most likely to feel this shift as a meaningful change to their business.
Who to Contact Once You Have the List
A generic executive contact is rarely the right entry point for this kind of outreach. Purchasing and procurement leaders are the ones managing the raw material and component sourcing strain described above. Plant engineering and operations leadership are the ones deciding whether to expand capacity, add shifts, or bring on new equipment.
Both roles are closer to this decision than a generalized owner or CEO contact, and both are more likely to respond to outreach that references the specific capacity pressure their category is under right now.
Why This Matters Even if You Don’t Sell Industrial Equipment
A manufacturer riding a demand surge like the ones described above is not only buying more raw material. AAON expanded its Memphis footprint by roughly 25% to keep up with data center orders, and companies scaling that quickly are also hiring, adding shifts, evaluating new logistics and insurance needs, and often outgrowing the software and systems that ran the business at its old size.
Staffing and recruiting firms, insurers, and software vendors have as much reason to prioritize this list as the manufacturers selling directly into the supply chain.
Explore IndustrySelect for Yourself
IndustrySelect gives you live access to MNI’s database of nearly 350,000 U.S. manufacturers, suppliers, and industrial service providers, backed by more than a century of human-verified industrial research rather than scraped data. Every filter described in this piece, SIC code, geography, and employee count, is available on every company profile, and each one includes verified executive contacts, so instead of guessing who handles purchasing or plant operations, you get names, titles, and direct emails for the people actually making these decisions.
Set up a free demo account, preloaded with 500 real company profiles, and start building your own list today. No credit card required.