The Globe and Mail reports in its Tuesday edition that Hammond Power Solutions transformers are in high demand for data centres, which has chief executive officer Adrian Thomas mulling whether artificial intelligence is in a financial bubble. The Globe's Joe Castaldo writes that Mr. Thomas has a clear sight line into the AI boom through his role at Hammond, a manufacturer with deep roots in Guelph, Ont. Hammond's products are proving crucial for AI development. The race for powerful AI has sparked a data-center construction boom. For instance, Meta is building a Louisiana facility the size of Manhattan, while OpenAI, backed by Microsoft, plans to invest around $500-billion (U.S.) in data centres. These facilities require large amounts of electricity, translating to more demand for the kind of transformers built by Hammond. These are unglamorous but indispensable pieces of equipment that convert the high-voltage electricity flowing through transmission lines into a lower voltage for the servers housed inside data centres. Hammond can trace its history in Guelph back more than 100 years, and its share price was fairly sleepy before the release of ChatGPT in late 2022. Since then, it has surged about 600 per cent.