The artificial intelligence (AI) boom is rapidly reshaping industries and prompting investors to reassess which companies are best positioned to benefit from its transformative impact.
Aside from the obvious winners, like Nvidia and other members of the Magnificent Seven, AI’s reach has extended far beyond the usual suspects – both reviving companies that form part of the emerging AI value chain and those embedding the technology to reinvent their business operations.
Below, fund managers and analysts have shared which companies they think are gaining renewed relevance in the AI era.
Amphenol
Peter Bates, portfolio manager of the T. Rowe Price Global Select Equity fund, and Giles Parkinson, head of equities at TrinityBridge, both selected Amphenol. They argued that the producer of connectors, cables and interconnect systems is a key beneficiary of the fast-growing AI value chain, due to mounting demand for electrical components.
Parkinson said: “After years of sluggish growth in cyclical end-markets like automotive and industrial electronics – pressured by higher interest rates and a muted global economy – the company’s fortunes have shifted.”
Amphenol is well-placed strategically for the AI surge, with its portfolio of fibre optic assemblies, high-speed copper cables and liquid cooling connectors – all of which are “indispensable” to hyperscale data centres, he said.
Bates added: “Amphenol is a good example of a company that has benefited strongly from the rise of AI but is not necessarily an adopter of the technology itself.”
The $153.4bn company’s share price has risen by more than 80% year-to-date and by almost 320% over five years.
Stock price performance YTD
Source: Google Finance
Last week, Bank of America analysts upgraded Amphenol’s stock rating from neutral to buy, with a price target of $150 – up from $120. They cited its future upside potential based on the recent influx of data centre build announcements.
Its data centre business has surged in recent years and now accounts for around a third of revenues, with total revenues rising from $12bn to around $18bn today, according to Bates.
Unlike more pure play AI hyperscalers, Amphenol’s diversified end markets – which span defence, mobile and industrial – also ensure resilience, Parkinson added.
Quanta Computer
Isaac Thong, portfolio manager of Aberdeen Asian Income Fund, pointed to Taiwan-based Global Fortune 500 company Quanta Computer, an AI server assembler.
He argued it is well positioned to capture the structural growth in demand for AI infrastructure and offers an attractive dividend yield of 5%.
Although the company has demonstrated a more modest share price increase of 5.9% year-to-date, over five years it is up 300%.
Stock price performance YTD
Source: Google Finance
“Data centres are the backbone of generative AI, housing increasingly complex servers that enable both training and inference workloads,” Thong said.
“Quanta’s technical expertise and long-standing ability to manage these sophisticated products continues to set it apart, particularly as demand, and the level of skill required for these complex products, is only increasing.”
The company has also made a strategic collaboration agreement with Rigetti Computing, a company focused on quantum-classical computing – with both committing to invest more than $100m each over the next five years to develop superconducting quantum computing technologies.
Elixirr International
Ken Wotton, managing director of public equity at Gresham House, has found opportunities in companies helping other businesses looking to harness AI, such as UK-listed consultancy Elixirr International.
The firm helps blue-chip corporates implement AI into their business operations – either through streamlining processes, enhancing productivity, or driving digital transformation.
Elixirr International became a publicly listed company in July, moving from the London Stock Exchange’s Alternative Investment Market (AIM).
With the share price up 20% year-to-date, it currently has a market capitalisation over £420m and is trading on a 21x price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio.
“After a period of being under the radar, Elixirr’s successful move from AIM to the main market, five consecutive record-breaking months of growth in the first half of 2025 and its dedicated AI strategy show how companies embedding innovation at their core can deliver both resilience and renewed investor appeal,” Wotton said.
Stock price performance YTD
Source: Google Finance
Prysmian
For Mark Dunley-Owen, manager of the Orbis Global Balanced and Global Cautious funds, there are attractive investment opportunities to be found in businesses that “provide the picks and shovels needed to make AI a reality”.
This includes power cable companies such as Italian-listed Prysmian.
“AI is incredibly power-intensive – such that securing sufficient amounts of reliable, 24/7 power is one of the bottlenecks to its growth,” Dunley-Owen said. “This has transformed the fortunes of companies that manufacture and lay the cables needed to move power from where it is generated to where it is consumed.”
Prysmian earned about €1 per share in 2018, with “barely any growth over the preceding years”, he noted.
Stock price performance YTD
Source: Google Finance
The €26.4bn company has logged a much stronger performance in recent months – driven by optimism around AI market developments in the infrastructure and energy space – which is reflected in its share price (a 40% increase year-to-date).
Cumulative underinvestment, industry supply consolidation and AI-driven demand acceleration has also prompted revenue growth and margin expansion such that it is forecast to earn €5 per share in 2027.
“Despite this strong performance, we believe it remains undervalued for an AI-adjacent business experiencing record demand for its services,” Dunley-Owen said.
Valmont Industries
Dan Scott Lintott, investment analyst at De Lisle Partners, highlighted Valmont Industries as a company reinvigorated by AI.
It started out as an agricultural equipment business known for making irrigation systems for fields but has since branched out into manufacturing for local infrastructure, making lamp posts, pylons and highway barriers.
“Unsurprisingly, Valmont’s methods of delivering services have historically been straightforward and unexciting,” said Scott Lintott.
“While it still needs to send people up lighting poles with ladders, it is now able to equip them with AI-enabled handheld devices that can be consulted to diagnose and provide solutions to problems up the pole.”
AI is also helping to provide real-time analysis of field irrigation, including detecting anomalies, crop stress and malfunction issues, he added.
The firm first bought Valmont in 2022 at $237 a share. This has increased to over $400 following increasing infrastructure demand and its “superior project execution helped by its use of AI in previously mundane tasks”.
Valmont also beat analysts’ revenue expectations by 1.7% last quarter, reporting revenues of over $1bn.
Stock price performance YTD
Source: Google Finance