Artificial intelligence: How Irish engineers are cashing in on AI boom

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 spec