Marketplace All-in-One
High-tech data centers get a powerful assist from a century-old company
16 Feb 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: How is Caterpillar benefiting from the AI infrastructure boom?
Caterpillar, maker of those big yellow machines, is profiting from the AI boom. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Stephanie Hughes. Caterpillar, which manufactures heavy-duty equipment, including asphalt pavers, diesel engine locomotives, and industrial gas turbines, has been around for 101 years.
And now the company seems to be one of the big winners of the AI infrastructure build-out. Big tech companies are working as fast as possible to get their data centers up to power artificial intelligence. Some are building their own natural gas plants to provide electricity for those data centers. Enter Caterpillar, maker of electric generators.
Marketplace's Dan Ackerman has been reporting on this.
data centers, they use so much electricity that they have to go through this whole special permitting and review process before they're allowed to connect to the power grid. They have to wait in what's called an interconnection queue, which is basically just a lineup of all the other power-hungry developments that are trying to get built.
So, you know, it's this list of factory projects and data center projects. And in a lot of parts of the country, that interconnection queue is a really long line. It can take years to get approval. So a lot of data centers are saying, okay, screw it. We're not going to wait to connect to the grid. We're just going to power ourselves. We'll generate our own electricity on site.
So what role is Caterpillar playing in this data center build out?
Yeah, so in addition to those signature yellow trucks, Caterpillar makes electric generators. They make these natural gas-powered engines that crank out electricity, and it's the kind of equipment that in the past would mostly be used for backup power, like it would be an emergency generator at a hospital, for example, if there were a power outage.
But because these data centers today are starting to go off grid, these Caterpillar generators are now being used more and more as a primary source of electricity, not as a backup. And these generators are just flying off the shelves.
Caterpillar has been around a long time making heavy duty equipment. How does that translate to the work it's doing on data centers?
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Chapter 2: What challenges do data centers face when connecting to the power grid?
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.
How does this position Caterpillar for the future, both in the near and the long term?
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. We've seen some of these so-called AI hyperscalers like Alphabet take on billions of dollars worth of debt to build more and more data centers.
And it seems like it's going to be plenty of work for Caterpillar, and it'll keep their production lines rolling through the end of this decade, at least.
That's Marketplace's Dan Ackerman. We'll have a link to more of Dan's reporting on our website, marketplacetech.org. Jesus Alvarado produced this episode. I'm Stephanie Hughes, and that's Marketplace Tech.
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