Fifty Shades of Data Center Gray

When you think about who is making money from the AI boom, you probably think of GPUs, chipmakers, power companies and maybe the people building the giant data centers themselves. What you probably don’t think of is paint. But it turns out that every one of those data centers needs to be coated, floor to ceiling, and two very old-school paint companies have quietly walked into the most futuristic industry on the planet.

Why does a data center need paint?

Not for the looks. Almost all of it is gray, and the color is mostly incidental, since tech companies are basically painting gray concrete and gray steel with more gray in buildings that hardly anyone ever walks into. PPG apparently offers its data center customers shades called light gray, gray and dark gray.

What matters is what the paint does. The biggest job is fire protection. Structural steel loses its strength in a fire, so it gets coated with special paints that swell up into an insulating layer when they heat up, buying the building time before the steel gives way. PPG’s Steelguard 951 is one of these. On top of that there are coatings that protect against corrosion, floors that can take heavy equipment, coatings that stop static electricity and electromagnetic interference from messing with the servers, electrically insulating coatings, and even heat-reflective coatings that reduce how much cooling the building needs. For a building full of very expensive, very hot computers, all of this adds up quickly, and coatings can cost somewhere between $3 million and $8 million for a single building.

Who is selling it?

The two names that keep coming up are PPG and Sherwin-Williams. Coverage of a New York Times report says PPG expects its data center paint sales to triple in 2026 compared with last year. Sherwin-Williams released a whole guide for data center construction in May 2026 and now pitches itself as a one-stop partner for the big cloud companies. When its protective coatings sales grew in the mid-teens this summer, its stock had its biggest one-day jump in over four years.

They are not the only companies that can make this kind of coating. Hempel, a Danish coatings company, markets fire protection coatings specifically for data centers, and companies like AkzoNobel and Jotun make similar fire protection products. But PPG and Sherwin-Williams are the two big paint companies openly racing for the data center market right now.

So did I buy the stock?

I did. When I found out about this about a month ago, I bought some PPG shares, and I can already see it rising. To be completely honest though, the recent jump came after a strong quarter that was driven mostly by aerospace and regular architectural paint, not data centers. Data center paint is still a small slice of a company that sells over $4 billion worth of coatings every quarter. So I was right about the trend, but whether it is what actually moves the stock is a different question. Let’s see how it goes.

Disclosure: I own PPG stock. This is not financial advice, and please take financial talk from a PhD student with a gigantic boulder of salt.