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Markets are at all-time highs, yet countless — I mean, they could be counted but — companies are trading as if their best days are behind them. It’s provided us with rich hunting grounds for this month’s Best Buys Now. Bargains, in other words. Real ones!
Foolishly yours,
Iain Butler
Advisor, Stock Advisor Canada
Best Buys Now #1
WSP Global (TSX: WSP)
Everyone knows the AI infrastructure buildout is one of the biggest investment opportunities in a generation. Almost nobody knows a Montreal-based engineering firm is one of the most important companies making it happen
WSP Global (TSX: WSP) is Canada’s pre-eminent engineering and professional services firm — and increasingly, one of the most strategically positioned companies in the world to benefit from the data centre supercycle. It operates in more than 50 countries with roughly 83,000 professionals, and they advise, design, and manage infrastructure for transportation, energy, environmental, and digital businesses.
What’s exciting now is the company’s dedicated data centre engineering unit. That team is active on major hyperscale and colocation projects in the U.S., the world’s largest and most mature data centre market.
WSP’s energy advisory teams are also solving the power availability crisis that is the single biggest bottleneck in the data centre industry, working with clients on on-site gas turbine power plants, wind-powered data centres built directly at the power source, and water-efficient cooling solutions for AI-density workloads.
What’s more, on January 21, WSP and Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) announced a $1 billion strategic partnership — and it runs in both directions.
- WSP for Microsoft: WSP remains the “engineer of record” for Microsoft’s global data centre expansion. WSP is currently managing the infrastructure design for Microsoft’s $19 billion investment in Canada (announced late last year), which includes new data centre regions aimed at keeping Canadian data on Canadian soil.
- Microsoft for WSP: WSP is deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot to its 75,000 global engineers. They are using AI to automate the routine parts of infrastructure design, such as validating project specs and analyzing environmental data, to speed the delivery of these very data centres.
Essentially, Microsoft provides the digital “brains” (Azure, OpenAI) and WSP acts as the “nervous system” and “skin,” designing the infrastructure that keeps those systems running without collapsing local power grids or exceeding carbon budgets.
Though it’s an opportunity that’s difficult to fully quantify, the bottom line is that WSP is in the data centre arena, which bodes well for the company’s future results. That the stock has pulled back nicely, rather than surging forward as so many in a similar position have, suggests market ignorance. But WSP won’t be cheap forever. At some point, the market will notice what Microsoft already has.
