TL;DR

Computacenter’s half-year figures show what the AI build-out looks like when it lands on a British balance sheet. First-half revenue rose 72% to £6.85bn, adjusted pre-tax profit climbed 87% to £152.4m, and guidance went up with them. It joined the blue-chip index in June, and its shares, already up nearly 100% this year, added another 3%.

Where the growth came from

Technology Sourcing did the work — the business that procures and installs hardware in volume. Hyperscale operators, so-called neocloud providers and enterprise buyers all spent heavily on data centre and AI infrastructure, and Computacenter sat in the supply path.

North America drove most of it, with profit there more than doubling: the region now supplies 62% of group operating profit, against 44% twelve months ago. The UK accelerated sharply as well. Germany held up underlying, though profit dipped on efficiency costs that arrived sooner than planned. Two US acquisitions completed in the period — GAI, which opens a route into American federal government work, and AgreeYa.

The margin trade

Selling hardware at this volume costs something. Gross margin dropped from 12.6% to 9.6%, nearly three points, which is the arithmetic of a business shifting weight from services towards sourcing.

The backlog is what makes that trade look deliberate rather than forced. Committed orders stand at £9.3bn, over four times where they sat a year ago, and full-year adjusted pre-tax profit is now guided to at least £380m against roughly £341m in analyst forecasts. Earnings per share on the adjusted measure nearly doubled; the interim dividend rose 15% to 27.1p.

Looking forward

The UK reading here is narrower than the headline suggests. Computacenter is capturing AI infrastructure spending, but predominantly American spending — the North American profit share tells you where the demand sits, and the growth is in reselling hardware designed and fabricated elsewhere.

Set against Arm’s chief executive arguing this week that Britain has no business building chip fabs, the position is consistent and a little uncomfortable: UK companies are doing well out of the AI build-out in the roles of designer and distributor, without much of the manufacturing value staying here. That is a viable business. It is not the same as sovereign capability.