Here's a roadmap to the next stages of the U.S. AI buildout.

As news trickled out about President Trump's announcement of a new $500 billion Stargate joint venture focused on artificial-intelligence infrastructure, some potential beneficiaries emerged.

Companies such as Oracle, NVIDIA, Microsoft and SoftBank Group Corp. (JP:9984) were involved in the initiative and saw their stocks move higher on the enthusiasm.

But numerous less-obvious names, spanning sectors, also stand to gain as the government throws its support behind a bigger domestic AI-infrastructure buildout. While some of these stocks rallied Wednesday following Trump's official announcement of the Stargate JV, others could get a boost down the road.

"It's a big dollar spend," said Sean Farney, a vice president of data-center strategy at real-estate firm JLL. "It's also good to see there is a focus on growing tech that has strategic value."

Here are some stocks and sectors to watch:

Optical-networking companies

Networking stocks made notable gains on Wednesday, with Arista Networks up 6.9% and Ciena up 7.0%. Arista has a strong relationship with Microsoft, which is involved in the initiative, and Jefferies analyst George Notter thinks the company's goal of $1.5 billion in AI-data-center sales for the year now seems "laughable" - in a good way - given the catalysts ahead.

Looking at Ciena, the company supplies to both Microsoft and Oracle. As the Stargate venture drives the creation of data centers in disparate locations, Notter thinks that Ciena's wavelength-division-multiplexing technology could help connect them.

Notter's Wednesday note to clients also flagged COHERENT, Lumentum, Fabrinet and Corning as possible beneficiaries. The first three make transceiver sockets that he expects to have a place in Stargate, while Corning makes data-center fiber and other fiber-connectivity products.

Data-center infrastructure plays

The U.S. is home already to about half of the world's established data-center footprint.

But there's also a global race to quickly build out this infrastructure, with global data-center capacity expected to grow 15% annually over the next few years.

The U.S. already had a leg up on the rest of the world in building out its data-center footprint

With that backdrop, Vertiv Holdings LLC was one of last year's hottest stocks. The maker of data-center infrastructure has gotten off to a roaring start this year as well, including with a 3.8% boost on Wednesday.

The company stands out in its market in part because of its technologies for keeping data centers running cool. Vertiv "is far more advanced than competitors in dealing with high-temperature GPUs," or graphics processing units, Evercore ISI analyst Amit Daryanani wrote earlier this month.

France's Schneider Electric SE also offers energy-management solutions, and its shares rose nearly 2% on Wednesday.

Data-center REITs

Shares of Digital Realty Trust Inc and Equinix shares both fell fractionally on Wednesday, though they moved higher in Tuesday's session in anticipation of the official announcement.

UBS analyst John Hodulik wrote earlier this month that generative AI "has added fuel to the fire and moved the supply/demand pendulum more meaningfully in favor of data-center operators."

To underscore the point, spending by the top 10 data-center companies, a list that includes Amazon.com, Meta Platforms, Inc., Alphabet and Apple has been estimated at about $200 billion a year, with that figure recently climbing to $300 billion, according to JLL's Farney. Most of the market leaders are U.S.-based companies.

Memory suppliers

William Blair analyst Sebastien Naji sees Micron Technology and SK Hynix Inc. (KR:000660) as possible winners from Stargate, as "memory is a critical bottleneck in AI data centers, particularly for inference use-cases."

He also called out Astera Labs, Inc., which makes memory retimers that are built into Nvidia servers.

"Beyond technology, the buildouts of these 20 data centers should also drive heightened demand for energy, cooling, and other industrial components," Naji wrote.

If a company says it plans to spend $100 billion to build a new data center, experts said the total price tag to get it operational - including chips, servers and everything else - can run three to five times the initial construction amount.

Energy sector

Recent data-center announcements keep getting "bigger and bigger in scale," said Patrick Wilson, a portfolio manager for CenterSquare Investment Management's real-estate-securities group.

"There's a lot of capital flooding there," he said. "The gating factor, though, is definitely energy." The chart below shows the global energy demand for data centers doubling by 2029 to 100 gigawatts.

Demand for energy from data centers is set to double to 100 gigawatts by 2029, according to JLL Research

Wilson's recent focus on investments in data centers has required a close study of America's power grid, available land and future energy capabilities.

Five years ago, data centers required about 3% of the U.S. power grid's output. That figure is now closer to 5%, according to Wilson. "By 2023, at this pace, data centers will be 10% or greater," he said, with some estimates putting it closer to 12% to 13%.

While America's significant natural-gas (NG00) capabilities could help fill some of the additional demand for power, along with renewable-energy technologies, the "true solution" being talked about at energy conferences has been around nuclear power, Wilson said, adding that could take a dozen years or more to build out.

"It's certainly not the race you want to lose," he said of the AI push and its potential applications in health care, agriculture and national security. "It's getting integrated very quickly."