Siemens sees no AI slowdown despite Republican rout in US

ملخص مفصل

FRANKFURT: The rout of US President Donald Trump’s Republicans in the midterm elections is unlikely to slow the boom in artificial intelligence (AI), German ...

FRANKFURT: The rout of US President Donald Trump’s Republicans in the midterm elections is unlikely to slow the boom in artificial intelligence (AI), German industrial giant Siemens said on Thursday as it reported record profits driven by demand from data centers.

Fears that the Democrats could clamp down on data center construction after winning control of Congress hit stock markets worldwide last week.

Speaking on an earnings call, Siemens CEO Roland Busch said the company was banking on the boom continuing, even though the elections had shown growing opposition to data centers.

“There are discussions on the one side, on the other side there’s bipartisan acknowledgment that a big driver of economic growth in the United States is data centers,” Busch said. “There’s nothing that worries us, at least not for the next couple of years.”

US tech giants such as Microsoft and Meta have together invested hundreds of billions of dollars in AI data centers. That has boosted companies such as Siemens that make much of the electrical and cooling equipment the sites need.

Swiss competitor ABB posted 40 percent order growth for the July-September quarter in October, while France’s Schneider Electric said the same month that its sales growth over the period had beaten expectations.

Other European companies in the AI supply chain have also urged calm and say they see solid growth ahead. Jochen Hanebeck, CEO of German semiconductor maker Infineon, said on Monday he expected more data centers to be built around the world, even if building them in the United States became more complicated.

In results for its fiscal year to the end of September, Siemens said its core profit rose 13 percent to 13.3 billion euros ($14.7 billion). The figure strips out some effects, such as the sale of motor maker Innomotics in the previous fiscal year.

In the fourth quarter alone, orders at Siemens’ “smart infrastructure” business, an indicator of future sales, climbed 40 percent to 8.67 billion euros, helped…

مطلع المقال، مقتطف من Kuwait Times. لقراءة المقال كاملًا، افتحه على موقع الناشر.