While reporting a story on the extraordinary comeback at GE led by CEO Larry Culp, I was struck by the high-voltage stock performance of GE Vernova. What from the outside looks like the ultimate old economy stalwart, it was once a pillar of the world’s most famous conglomerate. But since it was spun off from GE in early 2024, it has zoomed from a starting market cap of $39 billion to hit $288 billion on July 21. In large part, it was the AI explosion that powered the moonshot. Turns out GE Vernova is not alone—there’s a whole cadre of old-line companies that have mined the AI boom to multiply their valuations many times, and sprinted to join the $100 billion-plus valuation club. 

As a starting point, I went back three years to mid-July of 2023, the approximate point when hyperscalers began planning for big expansion in AI data centers, or later if the enterprise did a spinoff or went public more recently. The two criteria: Reaching that $100 billion market cap benchmark after beginning the race far back, and achieving annualized returns of at least 100%. The search revealed five especially notable examples in addition to GE Vernova. Four are effectively old-timers that like GE Vernova sell equipment to the hyperscalers: Seagate Technology, Vertiv, Western Digital, and Western’s recent spinoff, Sandisk. In the decade prior to the AI liftoff, they all they sat alongside the GE power unit in the underachiever category, registering tepid growth and weak profitability. Seagate and Western, the two that were publicly traded prior to the AI phenomenon, registered fairly flat share prices, and the original Vertiv franchise got axed by its parent for delivering chronically poor results.

Two of the choices are measured over a period shorter than three years. GE Vernova split from GE in April of 2024, and Sandisk separated from Western Digital in February of last year.

The sextet suddenly reset on a high-powered trajectory by hatching groundbreaking products that helped AI data centers achieve new frontiers in storage (Seagate, Western Digital and Sandisk), and cooling (Vertiv), while the soaring demand for power hiked sales of GE Vernova’s giant turbines. The sixth qualifier is the only one that doesn’t sell data center gear. AppLovin is an AdTech platform that greatly benefits from AI-driven acceleration in processing capacity. It’s that data-crunching prowess driven by the likes of Nvidia’s GPUs that enables AppLovin to achieve the top position in marketing and monetizing mobile apps and games.

GE Vernova started the contest at by far the highest market cap of just under $40 billion (it’s also being measured over a shorter period, since it’s been publicly traded for only two years and four months). All of the others stood at just $7 to $14 billion, and now boast valuations that as of the market close on July 21, ranged from $114 billion (Vertiv) to $288 billion (GE Vernova). At the median, their stocks advanced at a 145% annual pace over the past three years. During that period, their combined valuation jumped from $90 to almost exactly $1 trillion. The $900 billion-plus increase accounts for roughly 3.5% in the rise in the S&P 500 market cap since mid-July of 2023. By the way, the over 100% yearly share gains for the six is more than quadruple the around 30% for the Mag Seven. 

In terms of metrics, “100” is a common theme for these six comers, since they all sport valuations of over $100 billion and exceeded 100% a year in share gains. As recently as the spring of 2024, none of these future stars made, or would have made, even the top 300 list of America’s most valuable companies. (Seagate’s officially headquartered in Ireland but since it runs operations, and its CEO works, from Fremont, Cal., I included it among the six.) Here’s still another “100” connection. Now, all but Vertiv would rank in the top 100 of U.S. companies by valuation and as of July 21, and Vertiv stood on the cusp at 101^st. GE Vernova, Western Digital, Seagate, and Sandisk are all currently worth more than Blackstone, Salesforce, Pfizer, and Uber.

To label the group, I chose the term “centurion,” rooted in “centum” for 100 in Latin. Centurion’s summoned to describe Roman army officers who command 100 soldiers, cricket stars who score 100 runs and Navy pilots who notch 100 night landings. Hence, I’ll give these six beneficiaries of the 21^st century’s signature technological leap the title of “The AI Centurions.” 

Proviso: These sturdy legionnaires are victorious for now, but face uncertain prospects. They’re highly dependent on a continuation of the giant surge in spending on AI infrastructure. That number’s exploded from $35 billion in 2023 to a run-rate of $650 billion this year, and is expected to hit $1.0 to $1.1 trillion in 2027. A reduction in those outlays, or even a slowdown in their cadence, could send their shares sharply lower—especially since their PE multiples bracketed by 29 for GE Vernova to 88 for Seagate—mean the market’s expecting strong profit growth from current levels to keep their stocks climbing.

Here’s a look at how each of the Centurions has brilliantly hatched and exploited new technologies to ride the AI wave. (“Valuation gain” and “annualized stock gain” indicates rise from mid-July 2023 to July 21, 2026 or shorter periods for GE Vernova and Sandisk due to their public debuts at a later date.)

Vertiv (valuation gain: $10 to $114 billion; annualized stock gain approx. 120%)

Vertiv is the retirement project for Dave Cote, the GE veteran who ran Honeywell from 2002 to 2017, generating returns 2.5x the trajectory for the S&P 500. Vertiv’s precursor was a division of Emerson Electric that developed the first precision cooling system for IBM mainframes. “Emerson hated the business and hated the industry,” recalls Cote, and dumped it to a private equity firm. In partnership with Goldman Sachs, Cote bought Vertiv in 2020 for $4 billion.

“I was no AI savant,” says Cote, a long-time ace at manufacturing everything from appliances at GE to turbochargers at Honeywell who now serves as Vertiv’s executive chairman. “But I knew if I positioned myself at the center of this rise in digital data, something good would happen.” Cote and his team connected with Nvidia, and began work on a new cooling system for data center platforms deploying their GPU chips. “Nvidia helped us understand what their customers, the hyperscalers, needed, and what would be needed for the technology,” Cote told Fortune. 

To meet the huge new needs for processing, data centers deploy far greater rack, GPU and other hardware density than in the past. If the chips run too hot, their performance weakens and lifespan shrinks. Aided by Nvidia, Vertiv developed a system that instead of using traditional air cooling, directs a water and glycol coolant directly over the chips to absorb and remove the heat. The process maintains the processors’ temperatures at ideal levels. 

Vertiv’s customers are the Amazons or Alphabets that fill data centers with chips from the Nvidia and other suppliers, and colocation enterprises such as Equinix that own the facilities and provide power, hardware and cooling to hyperscalers that rent from them. Vertiv is posting spectacular numbers that mark a total departure from its sleepy past. In 2025, it grew sales 31% to $10.2 billion and operating profit six-fold to $2.1 billion. And Cote thinks the good times will keep rolling. “My career tells me that when something this wonderful happens, you wonder how long it will last,” he says. “But I’m convinced that this AI data center expansion is essential to the digital age, and will go on for a long time.”

Seagate Technology (valuation gain: $14 to $181 billion; annualized stock gain, approx. 130%)

Besides advanced cooling, data centers require a huge leap in capacity for the storage needed to run applications as varied as large language models and roadway and traffic data for guiding driverless vehicles. Formerly-struggling Seagate is enjoying a renaissance via providing fresh solutions that meet the immense new demand. Founded in 1978, Seagate thrived early on supplying its specialty, hard disk drives (HDDs) for the early IBM PCs, but took a wrong turn during COVID by building excess inventories. When post-pandemic orders fell far short of the volumes it anticipated, Seagate swung from strong profits in FY 2019 to a loss in FY ’23. By that point, this long-time tech mainstay faced fading fortunes as provider of price-competitive, legacy hardware.

But as Vertiv did in thermal management, Seagate found a breakthrough tailored to the AI onslaught. In early 2024, it launched a new architecture on its Mozaic platform called HAMR that multiplies the capacity on 3.5 inch diameter standard disks. Using lasers to heat the disks during “writing” allows for super-dense packing of data. The breakthrough overcame the traditional, physical limits of recording. In the process, Seagate made parking an exabyte far cheaper, and saved lots of data center space. 

A jump in revenues and profitability ignited the share price: In its third quarter ended in April 3, Seagate shipped 199 exabytes of memory to data centers, a 39% increase from its Q3 of last year. Propelled by strong pricing, revenues jumped even faster at 44%, and Seagate’s established a trend of collecting more profit per dollar of sales in each successive quarter. Proof point: In Q3, it reaped rich gross margins of 47%, a year-over-year jump of 11 points.

Western Digital (valuation gain: $10 to $168 bn; annualized stock gain: approx. 160%)

Seagate and Western Digital are fierce competitors that dominate the global hard drive memory field in a virtual duopoly, together commanding an estimated 80% of the global business. They battle across the full landscape of enterprise solutions, cloud storage, and portable consumer devices, and differ mainly in product design, Seagate offering maximum storage capacity, and Western proffering a greater variety of specialized uses.

As the AI train roared, Western re-engineered its hard drives to handle the massive new workloads at the data centers. Like Seagate, it’s also profited from a seismic shift: Prior to the AI takeoff, prices had been declining around 10% a year per terabyte. But now, orders are way outpacing the two rivals’ ability to fill them; Western’s sold out through 2026 and is now locking in sundry long-term contracts starting in ’27 and ’28. The squeeze has boosted prices of its offerings as much as 50% since the start of last year.

That blend of fast-rising volumes and pricing clout lifted Western from a $1.7 billion loss in FY 2023 to profits of $6.4 billion in the past four quarters. In the March quarter, its gross margins reached a sumptuous 51%.

Sandisk (valuation gain: $8 billion to $235 billion; annualized stock gain: 1600%)

In February of 2025, Western Digital spun its solid-state drive business (SSD) into today’s fully separate, publicly traded Sandisk. AI campuses typically marshal both the HDDs that are Western Digital’s speciality and the SSDs that Sandisk provides for different purposes. The HDDs are an essential tool for parking “warm” and “cold” data that require massive capacity and low-cost per terabyte, such as access to long-term archives. The SSDs furnish “flash,” “hot” storage using underlying NAND technology that features lightning-fast retrieval for the likes of real-time user profiles and active databases.

The spin proved a brilliant move. Though HDDs are growing fast, SSD sales are waxing even faster. That’s because data centers are handling towering inference and training workloads that need vast flash memory, and they can’t get that storage fast enough to clear the bottlenecks. The shortage of supply is rapidly raising prices, quickening Sandisk’s ascent. It’s also looking to the future via the development of High Bandwidth Flash (HBF), a technology enabling much higher density NAND storage that it created in a partnership with HK Hynix of South Korea. The consortium expects to launch HBF in the back half of 2026.

Sandisk’s posting sorcerous results: In the nine months ended April 3, its revenues jumped to $11.3 billion, up almost 110% from the comparable period spanning 2024 and 2025, while the earnings line mushroomed from a big loss to a gain of $5.4 billion. Incredibly, while its former parent is up a vertiginous 17x over three years, Sandisk’s exploded ten times as fast at 170x in its just 18 months as an independent, and now harbors a valuation that, as of July 19, was over $60 billion bigger.

GE Vernova (valuation gain: $39 to $288 billion; annualized stock gain: 120%)

By taking the CEO chair in 2018, Larry Culp shouldered probably the biggest rescue job in U.S. history. And the fabled conglomerate’s problem child was power. The franchise built and acquired immense new capacity to serve what its leaders predicted as a surge in global demand that didn’t arrive; they also underestimated the market share soon taken by renewables. Culp, in fact, spent his first year on the job mainly striving to fix power, and his switch to kaizen-style lean manufacturing and dividing highly-centralized management structure into around eight profit centers, all responsible for their own P&Ls, sent the business on the track to a strong recovery. Culp also spotted promising young manager Scott Strazik, now 48, as a rising star, and anointed him to run the newly independent business when it went independent as GE Vernova in April of 2024.

The revival in global energy demand to levels well exceeding GDP has proved a powerful tailwind. But it’s AI that’s supplied the decisive push. The rapid spread of data center is taxing the utilities’ capacity to provide them with sufficient power. Hence, the hyperscalers and co-lo providers are installing both heavy-duty and smaller aeroderivative natural gas turbines on-site to keep the server racks whirring and liquid coursing through the cooling pipes. The biggest units are around 30 feet in length, and cost roughly $250 million each, and GE Vernova’s got top share for both the super-sized machines and aeroderivatives by the hyperscalers.

AI data centers typically use 2 to 8 of the behemoths, or 40 to 60 of the aeroderivative models. GE Vernova turbines are now powering the xAI’s Stargate project in Texas, and OpenAI’s Colossus One campus in Tennessee. A venture teaming Chevron and American Engine No. 1, an investment firm that funds projects that drive American re-industrialization, just bought seven big ones that they’re leasing to Microsoft for a giant facility in Texas, machines that provide enough electricity to power three million homes.

Last year, about 10% of GE Vernova’s $59 billion in orders flowed from data centers. For 2026, it’s projecting one-fourth from AI on a far bigger total. Orders are swamping production, a common theme for the Centurion crowd, leading to fast-rising prices. It’s important to point out that though the AI push is providing the biggest boost to growth, GE Vernova is still getting 80% of its orders elsewhere. It’s doing a thriving business with private and state-owned utilities across the globe that are tapping its “electrification” sector to upgrade outdated grid networks. The data center boom is only one part of the growing, worldwide hunger for gigawatts that’s forcing the world’s generators of electricity to both provide far more power, and find faster ways to move it. Both needs are greatly benefiting GE Vernova.

In its just released Q1 report, GE Vernova guided to 2026 revenues at a mid-point of $46 billion, a 21% jump over 2025, and predicted a huge $12 billion in free cash flow for a leap of over 3x. Simply put: AI has transformed this old-line franchise.

AppLovin (valuation gain: $10 to $143 billion; stock gain: approx. 130%)

Once again, AppLovin doesn’t supply AI infrastructure like its five fellow Centurions, but owes its expansion to a new product driven by the immense computing power pouring from the AI fount, and now ranks among the world’s largest pure-play AdTech providers. AppLovin was born in 2012 to a co-founding team led by Adam Foroughi, whose family fled Iran during the revolution of the late 1970s to settle in California. Foroughi has stated that his father, a major real estate developer in his home country, was likely a billionaire who lost everything when the clan fled the mullahs’ overthrow in their native land. The AppLovin CEO credits watching the loss his parents faced for his relentless drive to triumph in his adopted country; for example, the boss insists on signing off on every new hire himself.

AppLovin helps app developers grow their audience in social media and gaming, and broke significant new ground by putting full-screen video and interactive ads inside popular mobile apps and games. Its fast ascent started in 2023 via the launch of Axon. It’s an AI “brain” that analyzes billions of consumer data points to target users most likely to buy products or engage with an app. Axon parses buying and travel patterns to predict the best candidates, say, for Clash Royale or Block Blast. Customers prize the platform because it’s expert at calculating the precise return on their ad spend. That data enables AppLovin to conduct dynamically priced auctions where advertisers compete on price to attract customers. 

AppLovin relies on the AI data centers to accelerate Axon’s constant learning, and fulfill its growing capacity requirements as it marshals ever-rising volumes of behavioral data on potential customers. This ability to scale fast at relatively low cost is enabling one of the quickest ramps in sales and profitability among the Centurions: Last year, AppLovin lifted revenues 70% to $5.5 billion, and profits 111% to $3.3 billion.

The Centurions stand in the shadow of the hyperscalers as overlooked heroes of the AI upheaval. Put simply, they’re selling the picks and shovels essential to the whole gold rush. Their future will depend on the Big Unknown: Whether the hyperscalers will find the gold in large language models and enterprise solutions to keep buying the tools that the Centurions have proven so resourceful in providing.