Caterpillar plans to expand production of large reciproc
Featured: High-resolution editorial view of Caterpillar permanent power generation units deployed for mission-critical data center backup and prime power.ating engines and turbines after third-quarter power generation sales rose 30%, the company reported on Oct. 29.
The Irving, Texas manufacturer is taking some large reciprocating engine orders as far out as 2029 and turbine orders into 2030, according to The Conveyor.
Power generation sales reached $3.421 billion in the quarter, up 30%, and Caterpillar attributed the increase mainly to turbines, turbine-related services and large reciprocating engines used in data center applications. Sales in the wider Power & Energy segment rose 18% to $8.784 billion, with segment profit up 31% to $2.143 billion.
Caterpillar targets nearly three times its 2024 large reciprocating engine capacity by 2030 and 2.5 times its 2024 turbine capacity. Part of its Winston-Salem, North Carolina plant, which currently builds locomotive engines, becomes a second assembly and test site for 3600-series engines, and the company has repurposed a 250,000-square-foot building in Wamego, Kansas to bring turbine capacity online sooner.
The first units of Caterpillar's restarted 10-megawatt MaK gas engine ship in the fourth quarter, with production ramping over about 18 months toward roughly 1.5 gigawatts of capacity. "We plan to ship our first units here in the fourth quarter, and we'll continue to ramp as we go through next year on restarting the 10 MW MaK engine, and using it in power generation," said Joe Creed, Caterpillar's chairman and chief executive.
Creed said the company continues long-term planning with large data center and prime power customers. "We continue to anticipate full-year growth in Power Generation for both Cat reciprocating engines and Solar turbines, driven by increasing energy demand to support the data center build-out related to cloud computing and generative AI," he said, according to Data Center Dynamics.
Caterpillar's total order backlog reached a record $78 billion at the end of September, up about $38 billion from a year earlier. The company expects about 58% of that backlog to be sold within 12 months, down from 59% in the prior quarter, according to its earnings call summary.
Caterpillar has supplied generation equipment to several data center projects. In January 2026 it agreed to provide 2GW of fast-response natural gas generators for the planned Monarch Compute Campus in Mason County, West Virginia, Data Center Dynamics reported. Baxtel's record for Nscale's Monarch Compute Bldg2 in Point Pleasant describes a self-supplied campus running 864 Caterpillar G3516 generator sets. Caterpillar and Hunt Energy agreed in August 2025 to deliver up to 1GW of generation capacity for North American data centers, Baxtel reported. Baxtel tracks more than 5,500 data center sites in the United States, operated by 855 providers.
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