How the A.I. Boom Is Driving Up Sales of Gray Paint
Tech companies are painting data centers with gray coatings on top of gray concrete and steel to resist fire, rust and static electricity. That has made data centers a fast-growing market for paint makers.
In a concrete building known as “the bunker,” researchers at PPG, a $24 billion company that makes paints, aimed torches at steel panels that were covered in a gray coating.
Paul Fenton, a PPG chemist and engineer, held up one panel after it had been blasted with flames. The paint had swelled from a millimeter thick into a black crust nearly 10 millimeters tall. That meant the coating had done its job: The thick crust had kept any fire from reaching the underlying steel and softening it.
“Just like a toasted marshmallow likes to expand,” said Mr. Fenton, who wore a lab coat and safety goggles over wire-frame glasses. The trapped air, he said, “keeps everything cold.”
The paint that Mr. Fenton showed off, called Steelguard 951, has become one of PPG’s flagship products for data centers — and its sales have boomed. As Microsoft, Google, Amazon and other tech giants have raced to build the computing sites powering the artificial intelligence frenzy, PPG’s business has also soared.
The Pittsburgh company said it expected its paint sales for data centers to triple this year from last year. That would far outpace the company as a whole, whose total sales grew 7 percent to $4.5 billion in the most recent quarter.
