Caterpillar (NYSE: CAT) jumped about 10.7% to roughly $838 on Tuesday — up ~9% pre-market and pushing higher through the open — after a June quarter that broke a company record.

The headline number: Q2 sales and revenues hit $20.5 billion, up 24% YoY from $16.6 billion — the first time in Caterpillar's history it has cleared $20 billion in a single quarter. Adjusted EPS came in at $8.17 versus $4.72 a year ago, blowing past the ~$6.20 the street had penciled in, and operating margin widened to 20.9% from 17.3%.

Two engines did the lifting — separately

Construction Industries: sales up 35% to $8.3 billion, led by North America, where retail demand jumped roughly 50%. That's the old-economy building/infrastructure side firing.

Energy & Transportation: up 17% to $8.2 billion — and within it, power-generation sales rose ~29%. This is the AI story hiding inside an industrials name: the big reciprocating engines and gensets that power and back up data centers. Resource Industries (mining) added 20% to $4.6 billion for good measure.

The forward signal is what really moved the stock. Caterpillar booked $9.4 billion of new orders, taking its backlog to a record $72.1 billion, and management raised full-year sales-growth guidance to the mid-to-high teens (from low-double-digit) — explicitly pinning the upgrade on data-center demand.

The ripple

CAT's power-gen surge is the same trade that lands on Cummins (NYSE: CMI): both sell the large engines and standby gensets hyperscalers buy to keep data centers running, so a +29% power-generation print from Caterpillar reads straight across to Cummins' Power Systems order book. And because CAT is a Dow component, its ~10% pop did real work lifting the index on Tuesday.

The one risk that flips it

This whole re-rating leans on the AI-capex cycle staying hot. Two concrete things to watch: whether that $72.1B backlog keeps climbing next quarter, and the next round of hyperscaler capex guidance from Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet — if data-center spend guides lower, the power-generation tailwind doing the heavy lifting here fades fast. For perspective, even after today's pop CAT still sits well below its June record near $1,073, so this is a sharp bounce inside a bigger pullback, not a fresh all-time high.

As of ~10:10 a.m. ET, Aug 4, 2026. Sources: CNBC, Caterpillar. For discussion and education only — not investment advice. Verify before acting.