Artificial intelligence investors are still crowding into Nvidia, Vertiv as the obvious hardware winners, but the next layer of the trade may be hiding in plain sight.
As of June 24, 2026, the AI buildout is no longer just about chips. It needs power, storage, bandwidth and reliable baseload electricity.
In other words, the market is starting to look for the picks and shovels behind the picks and shovels.
Seagate stock: Storage bottleneck nobody is pricing in
Every AI prompt, agent, image and video creates data. That data has to be stored somewhere, and that is why Seagate has moved from a sleepy hard-drive name to a serious AI infrastructure trade.
Barclays analyst Tom O’Malley has described memory and storage as the “most attractive vertical below accelerators” in the semiconductor supply chain, according to Insider Monkey.
The logic is simple. If AI workloads keep growing, demand does not stop at GPUs. It spills into the drives and storage systems needed to hold training data, user data and enterprise archives.
The caution is valuation and pricing. Fox Advisors downgraded Seagate to Equal-Weight, saying hard-disk-drive pricing expectations “may be getting ahead” of likely increases, according to StockAnalysis.
Ciena stock: Pipes powering AI’s data highway
AI does not just need compute. It needs data to move quickly between data centres, cloud regions and enterprise networks.
That puts Ciena, a major optical networking supplier, in a stronger position than it had during more ordinary telecom cycles.
Its equipment helps carry huge volumes of traffic across high-speed networks, and AI is adding a new source of demand at the exact moment customers are already upgrading capacity.
The bullish case is growth. Ciena has raised its 2026 revenue outlook as cloud and AI demand strengthened, while management has pointed to a growing backlog.
But the stock has not been without sceptics.
Morgan Stanley analyst Meta Marshall lifted the firm’s target after earnings but kept an Equal-Weight rating signaling that much of the optimism was already reflected in the share price.
Bloom Energy stock: Who powers the AI boom when the grid cannot keep up?
Power has become one of the biggest constraints in AI infrastructure.
Data centres cannot wait years for grid upgrades, and that has pushed investors toward companies that can provide faster on-site electricity.
Bloom Energy’s fuel-cell systems fit directly into that conversation.
RBC has remained bullish on Bloom, with Barchart noting that the firm still saw room for the stock to run even after a sharp rally.
The thesis has shifted as Bloom is no longer being viewed only as a decarbonisation story. It is increasingly being valued as a data-centre power supplier.
The company’s expanded partnership with Oracle has reinforced that view, showing how AI customers are looking for dedicated energy solutions rather than relying only on traditional utilities.
Still, the stock is no longer cheap or unnoticed.
Bernstein initiated coverage with a Market Perform rating, according to Investing.com, a reminder that even strong AI infrastructure stories can become stretched if expectations run too far ahead of execution.
Constellation Energy stock: Nuclear’s AI moment
Constellation Energy sits at the centre of another AI infrastructure question: who can provide clean, reliable power at scale for decades?
For hyperscalers, nuclear power has become more attractive because it offers baseload electricity, meaning power that runs around the clock.
That matters when data centres cannot afford interruptions.
Melius Research analyst James West has said Constellation is “well-positioned” to meet rapidly rising data-centre demand in 2026, particularly after expanding its portfolio with Calpine, according to Energy News.
The company also has the kind of nuclear fleet that large technology customers increasingly want to contract with directly.
Microsoft, Meta and other large buyers have already shown that long-term power security is now part of the AI arms race.
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