The electrical supply chain becomes an AI trade: Eaton's backlog jumps 48%, Caterpillar power-gen 41%, GE Vernova orders surge
The AI buildout is showing up on the order books of the companies that make power equipment. Eaton's electrical backlog jumped 48%, Caterpillar's power-generation revenue rose 41% year over year, and GE Vernova's Q1 data-center equipment orders hit $2.4 billion — surpassing its entire 2025 total. When the constraint is power, the picks-and-shovels are transformers and turbines.
The backlog numbers are the demand signal the capex forecasts imply, made concrete. A 48% jump in Eaton's electrical backlog and a 41% rise in Caterpillar's power-generation revenue are not speculation about future AI spend — they are orders placed for the switchgear, generators, and distribution gear that a gigawatt of data center requires before a single GPU powers on.
GE Vernova's Q1 data-center orders exceeding its whole prior year is the sharpest single data point. It says the inflection is recent and steep: the equipment makers are being asked to supply in one quarter what they used to supply in a year, which is both an opportunity and a supply-chain stress that will set delivery lead times for the buildout.
The strategic read is that the AI trade has widened well beyond chipmakers. The scarce resource is power delivery, so the value is accruing to whoever makes the gear that delivers it — and the lead times on that gear are now part of how fast any lab can bring compute online, regardless of how many chips it can buy.
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