PPG, a 143-year-old Pittsburgh company that started out making glass, expects its paint sales to data centres to triple this year from last year, The New York Times reported. The mostly gray coatings shield steel from fire, rust and static electricity inside facilities that Microsoft, Google, Amazon and other tech giants are racing to build. "I've never seen a boom as big as this," said Jenn Solcz, PPG's vice president of protective and marine coatings for the Americas. PPG's total sales rose 7% to $4.5 billion in the most recent quarter, and data centres still make up only a low-single-digit share of sales in two parts of the company, executives told the Times. Amy Ericson, a PPG senior vice president, expects data centres to grow "multiple times" faster than other infrastructure markets. Rival Sherwin-Williams is seeing a similar pull; its chief executive, Heidi Petz, said in July that its protective and marine sales rose by a midteens percentage from a year earlier, helped by data centre construction. Data centres go up in about a third of the time a typical infrastructure project takes, Solcz said. In April, PPG rolled out a data centre package at a trade show in Washington. The flagship product is Steelguard 951, which can protect steel for up to four hours. Matthew Giddings of real estate firm JLL said paint can cost $3 million to $8 million for one building.