Hey everyone, happy Friday!
Another post to build on the amazing recent webinar from Ed Croft and Graham Neary. This one delves deeper into the UK's AI opportunity, with a list of stocks carefully curated by the Stockopedia analysts.
If you've not seen the webinar yet, here's a link. And if you've got any thoughts or ideas on this article, please drop them into the comments below.
You may have heard of the AI data centres being run from a garden shed.
For those who haven’t, it’s a scheme where participants swap their boiler for a mini-data hub. The heat generated by the Raspberry Pi computers (more on them later) is transferred into the participants’ hot water system, saving hundreds of pounds a year.
Why bring this up? Well firstly it’s a fantastic example of British ingenuity. And secondly, a garden shed seems a good place to start talking about pick-and-shovel stocks.
Investors often say that when everyone’s rushing for gold, look for the companies making the picks and shovels. And as the UK’s AI landscape evolves, a whole spate of listed companies are springing into this space.
In this article, we’ll give you a curated basket of stocks drawn from Stockopedia’s recent analysis, and highlight three candidates in each of our guiding streams:
- Quality
- Value
- Momentum
So you get a a series of ideas to supplement (but not supplant) your own research.
Why we’re doing this now
The media’ AI coverage still focuses on a clutch of U.S.-listed story stocks, many of them pre-profit, and treat the UK as a backwater far removed from the party in Palo Alto. But the real picture is changing fast.
- Spending on UK data centres is set to rise by 400% in the five years to 2029 (Barbour ABI, cited by Reuters).
- At the same time, the trend toward distributed data centres is requiring new equipment and supply chains.
- Crucially, a host of companies in construction, property and asset management are now targeting data centre trade.
So which stocks are poised to benefit?
As part of their research for our results season webinar, the Stockopedia analysts created a thematic basket for AI picks and shovels. Here’s how they did it:
- They scanned Stockopedia’s entire back catalogue of news, articles and Daily Stock Market Reports since 1 December 2025.
- The research specifically looked for references to AI and…
