Data center trade revived on Iran war ceasefire

Data center stocks leapt early Wednesday, as the Iran war ceasefire reinvigorated risk-taking aimed at the booming AI build-out.

A wide range of stocks related to building and powering data center shells, filling them with chips, servers, racks, and memory, and then connecting those racks to one another and users around the world bounced hard in early trading.

Memory stocks like Micron, Western Digital, Seagate Technology Holdings, and Sandisk — favorites of retail traders given their massive performance in recent years — climbed.

Traders seemed to price in durable demand for memory and other chips, with the companies that make the machines that actually make semiconductors rising sharply as well. Dutch semiconductor machinery giant ASML rose, as did Applied Materials, Lam Research, and KLA Corp.

Fiber-optic cable and connecting companies like Lumentum, Coherent, Corning, and Applied Optoelectronics — which had been on a run before the outbreak of Mideast hostilities — regained momentum.

And the construction and engineering companies — MasTec, Vertiv Holdings, Quanta Services, and Comfort Systems USA — that have been feasting on the cash pouring into data center building and engineering also jumped.