The owners of a Cookstown engineering firm are the latest Irish industrialists to cash in on the soaring demand for equipment vital to the artificial intelligence (AI) sector.
TES Group has been bought by Legrand, one of France’s largest industrial businesses.
The terms of the deal have not been disclosed but the price is likely to have been more than £100m.
Foresight, a private equity firm which backed TES two years ago, said it had made a fourfold return on its initial investment.
The deal was driven by TES’s expertise in designing and making power systems for data centres.
Data centres are effectively warehouses full of computer servers which are central to the operations of AI businesses.
These facilities require a massive, uninterrupted power supply, not only to run the servers, but to fuel the sophisticated systems that keep them cool.
Companies like Microsoft and Google have been investing billions of pounds in centres like these as they compete to create the fastest and most useful AI services.
In 2025 the investment bank Morgan Stanley estimated that as much as $3tn (£2.2tn) will be spent on data centres to support AI between 2025 and 2029.
This has fuelled growth for specialist firms like TES, which provides the critical power infrastructure required by data centre developers.
Brian Taylor, the company’s chief executive, said that in the past few years they had “scaled our operations at an incredible pace”.
That included opening a new manufacturing facility in Ballykelly.
The company will continue to operate from its two sites in Cookstown and Ballykelly after the deal with Legrand is completed.
Tens of millions of euros
Meanwhile on Monday a different French firm agreed a deal to buy a company in the Republic of Ireland which also has data centre expertise.
Bureau Veritas said it would pay €375m (£327m) for LotusWorks which is based in Sligo.
LotusWorks specialises in the final testing and optimising of data centres before they are switched on and then looks after their ongoing maintenance.
The deal will mean a significant payday for the management team which has controlled the business since 2018.
But these deals are not the biggest data centre fortunes which have been made in Ireland in recent years.
In 2025 Cork-based Dornan Group was sold to the US construction services firm Turner for a reported €400m (£349m).
In 2024 the global investment company Blackstone bought a majority stake in Dublin-based Winthorp Technologies.
Both deals were worth tens of millions of euros to the companies founders and senior managers.
However, the most lucrative deal of them all concerns Philip O’Doherty.
In 2021 he sold his Donegal-based firm E&I Engineering to the US company Vertiv Holdings.
The value of that deal was reported as being worth £1.45bn in cash and shares, with about 80% of that going to O’Doherty and the rest to smaller shareholders.
The most important aspect of that deal has turned out to be the Vertiv shares that O’Doherty received.
The deal was done before the AI boom had really begun so each Vertiv share was then worth around $25.
Today Vertiv’s share price is around $250.
Since April 2024, O’Doherty has gradually been selling his Vertiv shares.
His most recent sale in March this year generated about £298m, bringing total proceeds from shares to about £950m.
He continues to hold Vertiv shares worth just under £1bn.
On top of that the cash portion of the deal was worth about£700m.
Altogether the total value of the deal has turned out at about £2.5bn making him the most successful Irish industrialist of his generation.
Originally written by: John Campbell
Source: BBC
Published on: 8 April 2026
Link to original article: How Irish engineers are cashing in on AI boom
