Dan Ackerman

And it's more recently been using some engines to put into electric generators.

So basically, they're making this equipment where you put natural gas in, the engine converts that into electrical power, and that can be used to power data centers.

Yeah, it's all about how quickly these generators can get up and running.

So I spoke to David Victor.

He's a professor of public policy at UC San Diego.

And he told me that these data center developers are just in an all-out arms race right now.

You're raising massive amounts of capital and trying to deploy that as quickly as possible.

Time to market for your power projects really matters.

Yeah, and just to make this a little more concrete, I also spoke to a data center developer in Utah who told me he looked into using renewables like solar or geothermal for his project, but really the thing that could get his data center up and running

as fast as possible was natural gas generators.

So he ended up buying 600 of these generators from Caterpillar.

So it's really this need for speed, which is causing data center developers to opt to go with natural gas.

Well, they're trying.

Right now, they have pretty much maxed out their order book.

On the earnings call last month, Caterpillar executives said that they've got a growing backlog for this power generation equipment.

So, you know, if you're a hospital and you want to get one of these generators for backup power, it is going to take you a little longer these days.

So as of right now, you know, Caterpillar is working as fast as it can, but there's still a growing backlog for this equipment.

Pretty well.

On that earnings call last month, the executives were pretty excited about this data center build out.

You know, again, right now they've maxed out their production capacity and it seems like that could last for years.