Weichai Power: Data center diesel generator sales exceed 1,400 units in first half, high growth expected this year and next

Bloom Energy has secured $25 billion in project financing from Brookfield Asset Management to chase the data center power boom, while rival fuel cell maker Plug Power is largely sitting the opportunity out. Brookfield expanded its existing agreement with Bloom to fund AI-related power infrastructure projects, lifting the total to $25 billion and giving Bloom access to substantial third-party project financing. On Bloom's second-quarter 2026 earnings release, CEO KR Sridhar said every major U.S. hyperscaler and more than a dozen U.S. neoclouds, AI labs, and colocation data center operators have validated and approved Bloom's power solutions for their AI factories, adding that Bloom is now a standard for AI onsite power. Plug Power, by contrast, remains focused on material handling, electrolyzers, and hydrogen production; CEO Jose Luis Crespo said on the 2026 second-quarter earnings call that the company has not made any decisions on data centers, even after announcing a July 2026 technical collaboration with Microsoft to test its proton exchange membrane fuel cells as a potential replacement for diesel backup generators. Wall Street rates Bloom a Moderate Buy across 26 analysts with up to 35% potential upside based on a $354 high target price, while Plug Power carries a consensus Hold rating from 20 analysts.

The top five US hyperscalers are projecting a combined capital expenditure of $660 billion to $725 billion for 2026, nearly double their 2025 outlays, as the AI build-out shifts from software to physical infrastructure. Microsoft is guiding for roughly $175 billion in adjusted capital expenditure for both FY2026 and FY2027, with two-thirds of quarterly spend going to short-lived assets like CPUs and GPUs and the rest to long-lived data center infrastructure, and it added 1 gigawatt of capacity in Q3 FY2026, doubling its global footprint in two years. Amazon AWS has raised its 2026 capex guidance to approximately $220 billion, with CEO Andy Jassy saying AI capacity is expected to remain constrained through 2027 and contracted demand extending into 2028. Meta saw profit drop 14% in Q2 2026 despite a 28% revenue increase as its build-out, including a 1 gigawatt data center in Ohio and a Louisiana facility that could scale to 5 gigawatts, compressed margins, while Alphabet raised its 2026 capex guidance to as much as $205 billion and its Google Cloud backlog more than doubled year-over-year to $240 billion. The Stargate joint venture involving Oracle, OpenAI and others targets up to $500 billion in infrastructure investment by 2029, and Oracle's FY2026 capex reached $55.7 billion, more than doubling from the previous year.

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.