AI Mania Makes Old-School Industrials Behave Like Chip Stocks

“These are not tech stocks. They trade like semis because their order books have become AI capex order books,” Dutta said, noting that Caterpillar is selling backup generators to data centers, while Vertiv provides cooling and power management equipment.

Indeed, the AI spending boom has reshaped the way that some of the sector’s most-storied names trade. Caterpillar, famous for its yellow backhoes and bulldozers, has surged more than 170% in the past 12 months. Sales to data centers have fueled a 250% rally in Vertiv and a 150% advance in GE Vernova Inc. over the past year.

“These are the picks and shovels and infrastructure behind the AI buildout,” said Emily Roland, co-chief investment strategist at Manulife John Hancock. She said that while the sector has gotten expensive, the “magnitude of the earnings beats” in industrials is outpacing other groups. At the outset of earnings season, she noted analysts had expected to see average earnings growth of 3%, whereas the sector has shown 20%.

Yey the risk is that any material slowdown in AI spending or a simple reversal in momentum in AI stocks will likely spill over into industrials, fueling swings in the sector that’s trading at a valuation premium to the broader S&P 500 that’s been exceeded just briefly this century. Shares of Vertiv and GE Vernova fell 5.4% and 2.8%, respectively, in late April after a report that OpenAI had missed internal targets for revenue and new users.

Philip Straehl, chief investment officer at Morningstar Wealth, wrote on May 7 that the US equity market “has increasingly become a concentrated bet on AI” as earnings growth is tied to AI infrastructure spending. He warned, however, that AI spending is at this point “just a forecast” and some of those spending plans could be trimmed.

“History offers many examples — from railroads to fiber-optic networks — where companies built capacity based on optimistic projections around future adoption,” Straehl said, adding that in those cases, the main beneficiaries were consumers, not investors.

To be sure, industrial stocks are trading in-line with some of their historic norms. After a spike in February helped the S&P 500 Industrials Sector outperform the broader S&P 500 by two standard deviations, the group is now directly in the middle of an expected 100-day breather, data DataTrek Research shows.

Still, the firm does see concentrated outperformance in the stocks participating in the AI buildout. “Industrials have recently enjoyed a renaissance in investor interest as a derivative AI trade, but that has left many leadership names with tech-like valuations but still capital-intensive, manufacturing oriented business models.”

The group has also gotten expensive: For the first time since 2021, industrials in the S&P 500 are trading at a higher forward price-to-earnings multiple than technology companies.

Those lofty valuations further set the group up for a potentially rough landing because the services they are offering are more commoditized than in the tech space, O’Rourke said.

“The industrial names have a larger risk” he said.

–With assistance from Matthew Griffin.

(Updates with Tuesday’s trading in third paragraph.)

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