Summary
- First-half revenue reached £6.85bn and adjusted pre-tax profit rose 87% to £152.4m.
- Computacenter’s product order backlog reached a record £9.3bn, up 323.2% year on year in constant currency.
- High-volume hyperscale, neocloud, and data-centre sourcing is increasing gross profit while reducing percentage margins.
Computacenter has raised its full-year profit outlook after reporting a record first half driven partly by hyperscale, neocloud, and AI-related data-centre infrastructure demand.
The FTSE 100 technology and services group reported revenue of £6.85bn for the six months to 30 June 2026, up 71.6% year on year.
Adjusted pre-tax profit increased 87% to £152.4m, while gross profit rose 30.5% to £657.9m.
The company’s product order backlog reached a record £9.3bn at the half year, up 323.2% year on year and 29.5% from the end of 2025 in constant currency.
Following a strong start to the second half and further growth in the backlog, Computacenter now expects full-year adjusted pre-tax profit to be significantly ahead of market expectations and no lower than £380m. Company-compiled analyst consensus before the update was £340.9m.
North America produced the largest step change, with adjusted operating profit rising 148.4% in constant currency. The region represented 62% of group adjusted operating profit before central costs, compared with 44% in the first half of 2025.
Computacenter said North American networking and data-centre volumes grew with hyperscale, neocloud, and enterprise customers.
The UK also delivered strong Technology Sourcing growth, particularly with neocloud customers.
The results provide a view of the current data-centre investment cycle from further down the delivery chain. Computacenter does not generally own the facilities receiving the equipment, but its order intake reflects how much hardware, networking, rack infrastructure, and associated integration work customers are committing to deploy.
Technology Sourcing revenue increased 88.8% in constant currency across the group. Computacenter said significant AI infrastructure volumes for hyperscale and neocloud customers contributed to the growth.
Professional Services is also being pulled into the deployment cycle. Data-centre projects require more than shipment of individual servers: high-density systems arrive with substantial network, storage, rack, cabling, integration, and configuration requirements.
As AI clusters become larger, more of that equipment has to be assembled and tested as an integrated system before or during installation.
The increase in volume is changing the company’s margin profile. Group gross margin fell from 12.6% to 9.6%, with Computacenter attributing the decline primarily to targeted rapid growth in high-volume Technology Sourcing activity in North America and the UK.
The business is therefore generating substantially more absolute gross profit while a greater portion of revenue comes from large-volume sourcing with lower percentage margins.
Its own investment is rising as well. Computacenter expects capital expenditure of about £70m to £75m in 2026, partly because of a new automated Integration Center in Atlanta planned to open in 2027.
The £9.3bn product backlog suggests that a large volume of infrastructure is still waiting to move through procurement, integration, logistics, and deployment.
That backlog is commercially useful because it provides visibility beyond equipment already delivered, but it also illustrates the operational scale of the current infrastructure cycle.
Data-centre expansion requires more than powered buildings. Once capacity reaches the fit-out stage, suppliers have to source equipment, integrate racks, install networks, manage cabling, configure systems, and move large volumes of hardware through constrained construction programmes.
Computacenter’s raised outlook shows that those downstream activities are accelerating alongside investment in the facilities themselves.
Power and planning determine whether capacity can be built. Once a project moves into deployment, equipment supply, integration, logistics, and specialist labour become part of the same infrastructure constraint.
