Generac Secures Amazon Backup Power Deal Worth $2.4 Billion

Caterpillar announced on September 15 that its self-driving haul trucks at a Luck Stone quarry are moving large tonnage, with expansion to two more Virginia quarries, Boscobel and Bealeton, including the first autonomous deployment of Cat 775 trucks. The company disclosed no order value, truck count, or profit contribution from the autonomy milestone, and autonomy was named on the earnings call only as a source of higher SG&A and R&D expenses inside Resource Industries. In the second quarter of 2026, revenue reached $20.5 billion, up 24% year over year, with adjusted EPS of $8.17, up 73%, while backlog climbed to $72 billion, up roughly $35 billion versus a year earlier. Power & Energy is the engine, with segment sales up 17% to $8.2 billion and power generation sales up 72% on large gensets and turbines for data centers, and gas prime orders extend toward the back half of 2028 and into 2029. Caterpillar trades at $798.51 against a consensus analyst target of $975.61, a trailing PE of 34x, and full-year tariff costs of around $2.2 billion for 2026, with expected IEEPA tariff recoveries of approximately $400 million.

Yuanta Securities said AI Capex investment is likely to keep expanding over the next one to two years. Although elevated US bond yields will remain a drag, growth in Enterprise AI that is driving cloud and compute demand will offset it. Returns on GPU leasing investment remain high, with payback within 2.2 to 3.1 years, and hyperscalers have the financial strength to invest at least another 2 trillion US dollars in AI infrastructure. The Data Center industry in the APAC region is set to grow at a 25.2% CAGR in 2025 to 2030, the second fastest in the world after North America at 26.8% CAGR, and excluding China it can still grow at 22.9% CAGR. Thailand stands to benefit from its infrastructure readiness and geopolitical neutrality, while the Thai economy is starting to see positive effects through AI-related exports and continued growth in FDI. Thai stocks that Yuanta sees as likely to outperform the market under this theme are divided into the AI Export group, namely DELTA, HANA, SMT and EPG, and the AI and Data Center Deployment group, namely GULF, GUNKUL, AMATA, WHA, STECON, BBL and SCB, for a total of 11 stocks. Foreign companies that stand to benefit include NVDA19, GOOGL19, AMZN19, LITE80, MRVL80, BE80, JPMUS19 and GSUS06, for a total of 8 DRs.

Generac agreed to supply up to $8 billion worth of backup generators for Amazon's data centers, sending its shares up 18% and making it the top performer on the S&P 500. The company also issued a warrant for a stake in itself, according to a securities filing, and analysts said the stock could double in price over the next 12 to 18 months. The broader market closed higher, with the Dow Jones industrial average adding about 300 points, or roughly 0.6%, the S&P 500 gaining about 86 points, or 1.2%, and the Nasdaq composite rising about 1.7%. Intel shares climbed more than 7.5% after South Korean memory chipmaker SK Hynix said it might team up with the company, following a Reuters report that it could lease part of Intel's long-planned Ohio chip facility or form a venture, though SK Hynix said no decision has been made. Among decliners, Paramount Skydance fell more than 4.6% as a Barclays analyst argued its proposed merger with Warner Brothers could introduce massive financial and operational risks and predicted the company would eventually split up, while Fluence Energy tumbled 15% after cutting its revenue forecast, which analysts attributed to production issues at its Houston facility.