Not every AI infrastructure winner carries NVIDIA's (NASDAQ: NVDA) name recognition, Alphabet's (NASDAQ: GOOGL) market cap, or Microsoft's (NASDAQ: MSFT) leadership. The buildout of the AI data center stack is creating significant value across companies and industries beneath the headline names, providing power systems, networking hardware, connectivity chips, server assemblies, and interconnects that make everything function.
While much of the market's attention remains fixed on the usual suspects, institutions have been steadily accumulating positions in a tier of companies growing faster, often with clearer visibility into forward demand than those above them. Here are five names worth paying attention to.
Vertiv Holdings: Powering the AI Data Center From the Inside Out
Vertiv (NYSE: VRT) makes the critical power management and thermal cooling systems that keep AI data centers running. As AI chips like NVIDIA's Blackwell and Google's Ironwood generate significantly more heat per rack than prior generations, demand for Vertiv's solutions has become one of the most durable structural tailwinds in the infrastructure buildout.
The company joined the S&P 500 on March 23, a milestone that triggered mandatory institutional buying and marked its evolution from a mid-cap industrial play into a genuine large-cap compounder. Its institutional ownership now stands at almost 90%, after almost $11.1 billion in inflows over the prior 12 months versus close to $9 billion in outflows during the same period.
Q1 2026 results, reported on April 22, confirmed the stock's recent momentum. Revenue of $2.65 billion came in 30% above the prior year. Adjusted operating profit rose 64% and EPS of $1.17 beast the consensus estimate by 17 cents. Management raised full-year guidance across all key metrics, and the market took notice. VRT hit a fresh all-time high of $330.30 on Friday, April 24, putting the stock up almost 100% year to date.
Following the earnings beat, multiple Wall Street firms raised their price targets that week, with JPMorgan to $350, Morgan Stanley to $350, TD Cowen to $347, and RBC Capital to $356. The consensus rating is a Moderate Buy, and the institutional conviction behind that rating has not wavered.
Arista Networks: The Networking Backbone Behind AI at Scale
Arista Networks (NYSE: ANET) is the dominant provider of high-speed networking switches and software for hyperscale data centers. Every major GPU cluster being built at scale requires the kind of low-latency, high-bandwidth networking fabric that Arista supplies. It is one of the most important companies in the AI infrastructure stack, yet it doesn't always get the retail attention its performance warrants. And its performance has been nothing short of incredible. Over the last 12 months, the stock has risen by almost 120%, with 30% of those gains arriving just this year.
The stock hit a fresh all-time high of almost $180 on April 24. The fundamental story underpins every bit of that move. Management raised its 2026 revenue guidance to 25% growth during its Q4 2025 earnings release and set a $3.25 billion target for AI networking revenue for the year.
Sentiment among analysts is overwhelmingly bullish, with a consensus Buy rating. Most recently, JPMorgan raised its price target to $200 in April. Evercore added the stock to its Tactical Outperform list, with a $200 price target, and UBS has the stock as a Buy with a $200 target as well. And when Alphabet unveiled its Virgo Network, the new megascale fabric connecting hundreds of thousands of AI accelerators at Cloud Next 2026, Evercore specifically called it an incremental positive for Arista's business. Ahead of its upcoming earnings in May, institutional investors have been buyers, with almost $19 billion in inflows over the past 12 months versus just $15 billion in outflows.
Celestica: The AI Server Manufacturer Flying Under the Radar
Celestica (NYSE: CLS) may be the most compelling story on this list that the fewest retail investors have heard of. The company manufactures high-speed networking switches, AI servers, and storage systems for hyperscale data centers, with a growing roster of hyperscaler customers. It is far more than a simple contract assembler. Its design capabilities, supply chain depth, and manufacturing scale across 15 countries give it a competitive moat that is increasingly difficult to replicate.
Shares closed at $410.21 on April 24, up 4.75% on the day and setting a new all-time high. The 52-week range of $81.88 to $420.63 tells the story of a company that the market has substantially repriced over the past year. Over the past 12 months, the stock has surged a whopping 360%.
And what makes the current positioning intriguing is that the company is set to report earnings on April 27 after the market closes. The company is set to report Q1 2026 results immediately after the close, amid high analyst expectations. The consensus EPS estimate of $2.07 reflects significant growth quarter-over-quarter. Ahead of that key report, the consensus rating for the stock is a Moderate Buy, with a consensus price target that forecasts almost 9% downside potential. Given its recent surge, earnings and guidance will need to impress for the stock to reprice higher or, at the very least, maintain its recent momentum.
Institutions are sitting pretty in the name ahead of earnings, though. Over the prior 12 months, they have purchased almost $8 billion of stock versus almost $4.5 billion in outflows. In the short term, whilst the stock may have slightly disconnected from fundamentals amid its staggering run this year, the backing from institutions over the last year will definitely give investors the confidence to hold through any slight pullback and correction.
Amphenol: The Connector Giant That Runs Through Everything
Amphenol (NYSE: APH) makes connectors, cables, and interconnect systems that physically link components within a data center. It is not a name that generates major excitement in retail trading forums, but it is one of the most essential companies in the AI infrastructure stack. Most servers, switches, power distribution units, and storage systems contain Amphenol components. And as data center density climbs to accommodate AI workloads, the connector content per rack increases substantially.
The numbers back that up. The electrical components giant has seen its stock surge by almost 100% over the prior 12 months, and almost 10% this year. Q4 2025 revenue grew 49% year over year to $6.4 billion. Q1 2026 guidance calls for $6.9 billion to $7 billion in revenue, representing 43% to 45% year-over-year growth. The IT datacom segment, almost entirely driven by AI data center demand, represented 38% of total sales in Q4 and grew 110% year over year.
Q1 earnings are due on April 29. Ahead of the report, analysts hold a consensus Moderate Buy rating with 15 ratings and a price target of approximately $156.71, implying about 5% upside potential. Institutions have been consistent accumulators, resulting in current institutional ownership of almost 97%. Over the prior 12 months, over $41 billion has flowed into the stock from institutions, versus just $22.6 billion in outflows, resulting in a staggering net inflow into APH.
Astera Labs: The Connectivity Chip Specialist Surging Into Earnings
Astera Labs (NASDAQ: ALAB) designs semiconductor-based connectivity solutions that eliminate the bandwidth and latency bottlenecks inside AI data centers. Its PCIe and CXL smart retimers, Ethernet smart cable modules, and COSMOS software platform are embedded in the rack-scale infrastructure. This is the exact infrastructure being built and used by the hyperscalers deploying the largest AI training and inference clusters in history.
The stock surged 7.7% on Friday, April 24, driven by renewed momentum around the Amazon-Anthropic 5-gigawatt Trainium capacity deal. A deal that analysts have described as a decade-long tailwind for the kind of connectivity solutions Astera Labs provides. Q4 2025 revenue of $270.6 million grew 91.8% year over year, beating the consensus by a meaningful margin, and EPS of 58 cents surpassed the 51-cent estimate.
In total, 23 analysts cover the stock, and it has a consensus rating of Moderate Buy. The institutional coverage is similarly bullish. Over the past 12 months, almost 600 institutions have purchased ALAB shares, totaling almost $7 billion in inflows. On the contrary, just over 250 institutions have sold ALAB stock for almost $4 billion.
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