Computacenter shares rise as FTSE 100 new entrant taps into AI boom

Shares in hardware reseller Computacenter rose 6 per cent after it forecast that full-year profit would beat expectations, making it one of the best-performing companies on the FTSE 100 this year as it has tapped into the AI boom.

Computacenter, which sells technology services and hardware such as cooling equipment and cables, on Thursday said it was on course to roughly double its adjusted profit before tax from the £81.5mn achieved in the first half of 2025.

The company added that it expected to deliver full-year adjusted pre-tax profits “comfortably ahead” of analyst expectations of £314mn.

Computacenter’s share price has also nearly doubled over the past 12 months, as it has become one of only a handful of tech companies on the London market that have been able to exploit the AI infrastructure boom.

Shares rose 6 per cent on Thursday, bringing its gains this year to 50 per cent, leaving it the second-best-performing company in the FTSE 100, which it was admitted to in June.

The 44-year-old Hertfordshire-based group said it had benefited from “stronger than expected” demand from so-called hyperscalers for its AI data centre services. Its customers have included US tech groups Tesla, Meta and xAI.

The £4.7bn company’s growth has been driven by a flurry of acquisitions in the US over the past few years, which have positioned it to benefit from the proliferation of AI data centres in the country.

This year it has announced the purchases of Government Acquisitions Inc, which sells tech to US federal agencies and AgreeYa Solutions, a technology services group.

Computacenter was founded in 1981 and from the 1990s began to act as an IT services contractor for large UK businesses. It expanded into Europe and the US and in 1998 listed on the London Stock Exchange. It joined the FTSE 100 in June.

The company’s move into data centre hardware and services gathered steam in 2022 when it secured a contract with what it described as “one very large volume customer”, believed by analysts to be Facebook owner Meta, which was attempting to build infrastructure for its “Metaverse” augmented reality project.

Revenues were flat in the years that followed but jumped 32 per cent to £9.2bn in 2025 after what the company described as “buoyant hyperscale customer demand”.

Peter McNally, an equity research analyst at Stifel, said Computacenter was “somewhat uniquely positioned to deliver large projects for hyperscalers” because of its experience building out computer networks.

He said Computacenter had sought to expand into the higher-margin services business and now had “probably the biggest” services offering of the so-called value-added resellers — businesses that buy tech and sell it on to end users as ready-to-use products.