Caterpillar Expands Robot Trucks to Two More Virginia Quarries
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.
Crusoe Raises $3.9 Billion Series F at $30.9 Billion Valuation
Crusoe announced the initial closing of its anticipated $3.9 billion Series F funding round at a $30.9 billion post-money valuation. The oversubscribed round was co-led by Atreides Management, Mubadala Capital, and Valor Equity Partners, with backing from new and existing investors including Founders Fund, GIC, NVIDIA, Qatar Investment Authority, Radical Ventures, and TPG. The company said the capital will help it scale existing programs and build out its own AI factories, from large-scale vertically-integrated campuses to modular Crusoe Spark units, fueling growth of Crusoe Cloud. Crusoe reported over $140 billion in total contracted value across its vertically-integrated platform and more than 6 GW of gross contracted capacity across data centers and cloud, including 1 GW of gross capacity delivered and operational today. The company also cited 20x-plus year-over-year growth in Crusoe Cloud bookings year to date and over $100 million in contracted ARR for Crusoe Managed Inference, launched late last year.
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BlackRock AI Infrastructure Partnership to Deploy Over 3 Million Tradespeople
BlackRock and its AI Infrastructure Partnership signed an agreement in August with North America's Building Trades Unions to give unions visibility into the coming project pipeline and to train and deploy the workforce needed to build it, with more than 3 million skilled craft professionals represented across the U.S. and Canada. BlackRock expects the expansion of data centers, power generation and related infrastructure to create hundreds of thousands of skilled jobs, and its separate $100 million Future Builders initiative aims to reach 50,000 workers over five years. For traveling union members, pension contributions made while working outside a home local may stay with the jobsite fund or return home through reciprocal arrangements such as money-follows-the-man, while pro-rata reciprocity can combine service earned under multiple participating funds for eligibility or vesting purposes, with each fund responsible for its share. Social Security instead keeps a single lifetime earnings record regardless of the states worked, using the highest 35 years of indexed earnings, though the Social Security Administration ordinarily limits corrections to an earnings record after three years, three months and 15 days, with important exceptions. The company said workers should confirm how reciprocity works before taking an out-of-area job, keep records from every fund and local, and check their Social Security earnings record against W-2s from every state worked.
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