The news
Caterpillar is taking orders for some large reciprocating engines as far out as 2029 and for turbines into 2030. Demand for data centers built for cloud computing and AI generative is helping push the order window further out.
Some diesel backup orders can still be scheduled for 2028. Smaller generator sets have much shorter lead times.
“There’s no slack in the system,” CEO Joe Creed said after a test cell went down briefly in the third quarter.
The details
Caterpillar’s order window has moved further out with each quarterly update. In January, the company said it was taking large engine and turbine orders further into the future.
By April, some large engine orders extended well into 2028.
In August, gas prime power orders reached late 2028 and turbine orders extended into 2029.
The latest update pushes some large reciprocating engine orders into 2029 and turbine orders into 2030.
Caterpillar expects to ship 58% of its backlog within the next 12 months, down from 59% last quarter.
Caterpillar’s whole order book has grown alongside. It reached a record $78 billion at the end of September, up about $38 billion, or 96%, from a year earlier. Orders increased across all three of Caterpillar’s main segments.
Power and Energy sales rose 18% to $8.8 billion in the third quarter.
Power generation sales to users rose 75%, driven by demand for turbines and large reciprocating engines for data centers.
Caterpillar is expanding production to meet demand. It plans to increase large reciprocating engine capacity to nearly three times its 2024 level by 2030.
It will use part of its Winston-Salem, North Carolina, plant, which currently makes locomotive engines, as a second assembly and test site for its 3600-series engines. The move will support demand for natural gas compression.
The plans to increase new turbine capacity to 2.5 times its 2024 level.
It has repurposed a 250,000-square-foot building in Wamego, Kansas, to bring some of that capacity online sooner.
What peers are doing
GE Vernova is taking gas turbine reservations for delivery in 2032. Its gas turbine equipment backlog and slot reservation agreements reached 122 gigawatts at the end of September, up from 116 gigawatts three months earlier. The company expects that figure to reach at least 130 gigawatts by year-end.
About 20% of its roughly 100 customers are data centers. The rest are traditional customers.
What’s next
Caterpillar plans to ship the first units of its restarted 10-megawatt MaK gas engine in the fourth quarter. Production is expected to ramp over about 18 months, reaching roughly 1.5 gigawatts of capacity.
(Photo: Thepointstoryline / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)
