Microsoft and Chevron Partner on 2.67-Gigawatt Permian Power Plant for AI Data Centers

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.

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.