The latest generation of Vestas wind turbines with a wheat field with Rocky Mountains. Photo: Eye Ubiquitous/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Europe's Wind Champion Rides the Data Center Boom, but China Looms Large
Vestas, the Danish wind power giant, is enjoying a new lease on life thanks to the rise of data centers. The company has weathered inflation and political turmoil in recent years. Whether it can withstand the gathering storm of Chinese competition is another matter entirely.
Vestas ranks among the world's largest wind turbine manufacturers, at least by installed capacity. By mid-2026, the Danish company had installed more than 207 gigawatts (GW) worldwide, a milestone that lets Europe claim leadership in one of the few industrial sectors where it still competes at the very top.
That leadership, however, is more fragile than the headline number suggests: Chinese manufacturers, led by Goldwind, now dominate the number of new wind turbines installed worldwide each year.
This explains much of Vestas' appeal to investors. Its stock market history reads almost like a textbook chronicle of how the world's attitude toward wind energy has shifted over the past 20 years.
Riding the Green Wave to a Peak
The historical performance of the Danish company's stock price reads like an open chronicle of how wind energy has fared globally over the past 20 years. During that time, companies in this sector have experienced everything, from soaring profits to fears of outright collapse.
Vestas' first major resurgence came in 2013, at a moment when many investors had already written off the investment as a lost cause. Vestas replaced its long-time CEO, Ditlev Engel, generated a positive cash flow of €1bn ($1.16bn), and delighted shareholders with 400% growth in a single year.
Source: TradingView
Starting in 2014, Vestas entered a period of sustained growth, as capital poured into wind energy in full force and the company's margin rose to double digits. Even the COVID-19 pandemic failed to shake investors' conviction in the necessity of the energy transition. If anything, the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) investment boom that followed only reinforced it.
These criteria evaluate companies on more than their ability to generate profits alone. ESG scores created a new hierarchy of values for institutional investors, and dedicated funds were established that committed to selecting for their portfolios only companies meeting these criteria. Vestas benefited directly: according to the Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI) ESG rating, the company currently holds the highest possible AAA rating.
Demand grew accordingly, and with it the price of green stocks. Joe Biden's inauguration in the US and the EU's Green Deal policies only fueled this interest, as investors speculated on massive government investment in renewable energy. The result was a classic investment frenzy. Vestas shares peaked in early 2021.
Yet on the stock market, the higher a share climbs, the further it has to fall, and 2021 delivered that reckoning in full. A slow-building wave of inflation began sweeping the globe that year, exposing a structural weakness common to most companies in the sector: prices are typically fixed years in advance.
For turbine manufacturers, transportation proved the biggest culprit of all, as shipping and logistics costs surged worldwide. Vestas found itself in the paradoxical position of operating at full capacity while still losing money.
By 2023, most central banks had turned to raising interest rates to bring inflation under control, and the move struck the wind sector twice over. Developers faced a dramatic rise in borrowing costs at precisely the moment when the sums involved in financing wind power plants were largest, and given the scale of these projects, even a half-percentage-point increase in interest rates has a significant impact on margins. At the same time, heavily indebted governments were forced to scale back the generous subsidy programs, programs that were, in any case, becoming increasingly difficult to defend politically.
Despite this difficult backdrop, Vestas returned to profitability in 2023. In 2024, however, a new and more political challenge emerged in the shape of Donald Trump. The Republican candidate campaigned on a promise to curtail the generous support for green energy that the Biden administration had introduced, and his ambitions did not stop there.
Trump singled out wind farms specifically, pledging to his voters that, upon returning to the White House, he would halt new offshore wind projects on his very first day in office. The significance of such a pledge was clear: if the US turns away from this support, a large number of states that look to Washington for direction are likely to follow suit, amplifying the effect of any single policy reversal.
Tariffs added a further layer of uncertainty, weighing on manufacturers already contending with policy risk. Unsurprisingly, investors grew reluctant to buy green stocks, and Vestas' share price dropped by more than 40%. Trump had not even taken office yet, but markets, as they often do, had already priced in the anticipated damage.
The US market matters enormously to Vestas: roughly one in every five of its turbines is installed there. Even so, this was not the same order of crisis as in 2012, when the company stood on the brink of collapse. The deeper problem this time was one of confidence: the market had come to doubt whether Vestas' margins would return to double digits in the near future.
But, as often happens with Trump, reality proved more complicated than the rhetoric. He did follow through on several of these measures against wind farms, yet a number of his decisions have since been blocked by legal challenges in federal courts. Taken as a whole, the outcome of his campaign against wind power has been decidedly mixed.
In 2026, onshore wind farm installations in the US are expected to reach a five-year high. Vestas shares are thus experiencing a strong resurgence among investors. And it is not just the failure of the Trump administration's campaign against wind power that explains this recovery.
Both wind and solar power have found an unexpected new ally in the rapid expansion of data centers. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), electricity consumption in the US is expected to grow at a rate of close to 2% a year through 2030.
This growth is primarily attributable to data centers, whose power needs have expanded far faster than utilities anticipated even a few years ago. Tech giants, for their part, are highly attuned to the politics of energy sourcing, and this sensitivity has become one of the key arguments used to justify building new facilities in the first place.
Opponents often criticize data centers for their high energy consumption and for the environmental impact of generating such large volumes of electricity. Wind farms offer companies a partial answer to this criticism, since they help reduce the carbon footprint, and today's tech executives love that. And it is not simply a matter of convenient marketing.
Google, for instance, supported the construction of wind farms in Minnesota with a combined capacity of 1.4 GW. To put that figure in context, Vestas' latest results show that the company delivered turbines with a capacity of roughly 1.1 GW to the United States in the second quarter of this year alone. So this is no small project.
Even more consequential for the wind power sector, arguably, is the shift in who is footing the bill. Previous waves of wind farm construction relied heavily on government assistance. That dynamic is now being reversed. Wind farms are increasingly being built because the private sector itself needs new sources of electricity and wants a certain share of that supply to be emission-free.
Wind cannot, for purely technical reasons, meet the power needs of data centers on its own. The wind blows where it wants and, more importantly, when it wants. What matters for investors and companies like Vestas is that overall demand for electricity has begun growing rapidly again after a long period of stagnation.
None of this, however, guarantees a rosy future for shareholders of Vestas and its peers. The greatest long-term risk to the sector lies not in Washington or Brussels but in Beijing. China is currently building more wind power capacity than any other country in the world. And, as always, it relies overwhelmingly on its own domestic industry, which is ready to export to Europe.
In the US, Chinese companies operating in the energy sector are subject to close scrutiny on national security grounds, and Washington has made clear it does not want Chinese suppliers gaining a foothold in strategic energy infrastructure.
Europe, for its part, is not currently planning a blanket ban on Chinese manufacturers’ access to its market, although the EU has begun restricting public financing for projects using certain high-risk Chinese components. Whether or not this amounts to a security concern in the strictest sense, the economic risk is harder to dismiss. European companies in the wind power sector could yet suffer the same fate as the continent's solar industry, where Chinese manufacturers have overwhelmed the competition almost entirely.
Tracking the performance of Vestas' stock price is thus not just a matter of following wind power. It has become, in effect, a proxy for a much larger question: whether industrial and technological production in Europe still has a viable future.
