Caterpillar posts 24% sales gain to $20.5 billion as data centers lift demand

Caterpillar has delivered strong growth this year, and the stock has jumped 37% year-to-date, leaving investors paying a considerable premium for a slice of the company. That valuation sets up the central question: whether earnings can keep growing fast enough to justify it.

The latest results suggest demand remains strong. Second-quarter sales and revenues rose 24% year over year, adjusted profit per share jumped 73%, and the order backlog reached roughly $72.1 billion at the end of June, up 15% from the previous quarter. The construction segment itself remains healthy, with sales to users up 22% in the quarter, but the company is increasingly benefiting from diversifying its revenue sources, including power generation for data centers.

That diversification looks likely to matter more if the construction cycle eventually loses momentum. Caterpillar expects power-generation growth to be driven by rising energy demand linked to cloud computing and generative AI data centers, and its backlog grew across all three primary segments. How durable that demand proves — and whether it is enough to carry earnings through a construction slowdown — is the open question for a stock already priced for continued growth.