A new electricity supercycle is under way

THE factory floor of Schneider Electric’s plant in Conselve, Italy, hums with urgency. Workers at the power equipment company’s facility, which is in the middle of a major expansion, are busily assembling advanced cooling systems for the data centres underpinning the development of artificial intelligence (AI).

“The key is the integration of grid to chip and chip to chiller,” said Pankaj Sharma, an executive at the company, referring to a new design it recently developed with Nvidia, an AI chip giant.

Over the past year, Schneider’s market capitalisation rose by over a third, to around US$140 billion. It is not the only maker of electrical gear that is booming. The market value of Hitachi, a Japanese conglomerate, has tripled since the start of 2022, thanks in part to the rapid expansion of its power equipment division.