4 Stocks Powering the AI Revolution Behind the Scenes

PG&E announced a new phase of its community microgrid program backed by US$73 million in funding commitments, disclosing fresh grant agreements and a second round of awards for local clean energy resilience projects. The new funding extends the utility's community microgrid efforts into additional regions that have faced recurring outage and reliability concerns. PG&E operates a large regulated utility through Pacific Gas and Electric Company, supplying electricity and natural gas across northern and central California, and expanding community microgrids ties directly into how this US$29.5b operator manages reliability for its service territory. The clearest early signal to track is how many of the funded microgrid projects actually reach construction and successful operation on schedule, with PG&E securing timely cost recovery approvals from regulators for the roughly US$73 million already authorized and future tranches that could follow this template.

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.

Generac Holdings has secured a major long-term supply agreement with Amazon to provide backup power generators for Amazon data centers, sending its shares up 18.3% to close at $207.23. In a regulatory filing, Generac disclosed that initial deliveries are expected to total $2.4 billion across 2027 and 2028, and it issued Amazon.com NV Investment Holdings LLC a warrant to acquire up to 1,693,745 shares of common stock at an exercise price of $200.9266 per share. Of the total warrant shares, 307,954 vested immediately, while the remainder will vest in tranches contingent on aggregate gross payments, net of certain offsets, received by Generac and its affiliates from Amazon and its affiliates for backup power generators, extending up to a total of $8 billion of qualifying payments. The agreement adds scale and visibility to a data center business that is emerging as Generac's key growth engine, after the company generated more than $100 million of data center revenues in the second quarter and reported a data center backlog of $1.6 billion as of July 2026, including roughly $1 billion of new orders in the prior 90 days. Management also raised its 2026 data center revenue expectation to roughly $450 million, and Generac is expected to post quarterly earnings of $2.40 per share on revenues of $1.32 billion in its upcoming report.