Caterpillar, maker of those big yellow machines, it's 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 buildout.

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 buildout?

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

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