Air Products and Chemicals — AI supply-chain exposure

Air Products is one of the handful of industrial-gas majors that build and run on-site plants and supply the bulk and specialty gases semiconductor fabs consume — nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen and the ultra-pure process gases used in etching and deposition. In the chain it is a deep upstream supplier to the foundry layer: fabs cannot run without a continuous, contamination-free gas supply piped in at scale.

Its structural hook is the stickiness of on-site supply. Once a gas company builds a plant beside a fab under a long-term contract, it becomes embedded infrastructure that is costly and disruptive to switch, giving durable, utility-like exposure to fab expansion. The model places it at a modest centrality because the gases are essential but commoditised inputs, several layers removed from the accelerators — critical to keep fabs running, but not the scarce bottleneck themselves.