AI data centers now need their own special gray paint

The AI boom has reached the paint aisle. The New York Times reported Thursday that tech companies are painting data centers with gray coatings on top of gray concrete and steel to resist fire, rust and static electricity, which has made them a fast-growing market for paint makers. Techmeme’s summary of the story puts those coatings at $3 million to $8 million per building, citing JLL.

The star product puffs up like a marshmallow. At PPG’s test building, known as “the bunker,” researchers aim torches at painted steel panels, and the Times watched one coating swell from a millimeter thick into a black crust nearly 10 millimeters tall. That crust kept the fire from reaching the steel and softening it. PPG chemist Paul Fenton explained it to the paper this way: “Just like a toasted marshmallow likes to expand.”

That coating is called Steelguard 951, and Buildings magazine lists it at up to four hours of fire protection, applied up to 3,500 microns thick in a single coat. PPG segment manager Kristine Gallagher wrote on the company’s site in May that building codes increasingly call for multi-hour fire-protection coatings on structural steel where office and operations staff sit near the servers.

The money is following the coatings. PPG expects its paint sales for data centers to triple this year from last year, the Times reported, far outpacing the company as a whole. Painters are specializing too. In a sponsored interview with Bisnow, Graydaze Contracting CEO Alec Kinard said his data-center-only painting division, DataCoat, was on over 20 such projects across six states.

If you invest in, build or just watch the AI build-out, I’d look past the chips. A passage from the Times, quoted on Techmeme, says the same buildings are also boosting sales of gravel for their foundations and floors, plus the wires and cables that carry power and data to the servers. (Somebody has to sell the gravel.)

Every AI headline about chips has a quieter one about paint behind it.