Data Center Stocks: The Year Thus Far

Yesterday we looked at the strong performance of data center stocks in the just-concluded second quarter. But how about the year to date? The first half of 2008 was a rough ride for publicly-held data center companies, as adding the first quarter results produced a more mixed picture.

Half of the 12 stocks we track outperformed the Dow, which declined 14.4 percent in the first half. Only four companies' shares were in positive territory, and of those only Rackable (RACK) holds a double-digit gain for the year (up 34 percent). As we noted yesterday, Rackable has benefitted from growing interest in servers for high-density cloud computing and data center containers, two of the specialized markets targeted by the company.

Here's our list of data center stock performance for the first half of 2008.

For additional market data and historic performance, see our full-year roundups for 2006 and 2007 and the first quarter and second quarter of 2008.