NEW YORK — Caterpillar builds generators that are used in data centres. Since June 30, when its stock set a record, the company has lost $214 billion of market value — 44 percent of it, gone.
However, Caterpillar is not an exception. This is a typical case. The Financial Times reported on Sunday that manufacturing, utility and mining companies associated with data centre construction have lost $4.2 trillion in market value since June. Nearly half of the gains made over the last year ($9.4 trillion) have been wiped out.
The value of Oklo, a nuclear energy firm, dropped by 49 percent even in spite of the fact that in January, the company secured a contract with Meta. Comfort Systems is worth only half of what it was before. The same is true about Corning that makes fibre optics. The Financial Times, using FactSet data, identified the sharpest decline among companies associated with the construction of data centres based on media reports.
Investors were buying stocks of these companies as much as possible for the first half of 2026. They were in fashion then. However, this trade was reversed in June due to two reasons: huge debt taken by big tech companies in order to finance their building booms and a growing political debate in the United States about necessity of building new data centres. Industrials are currently the second worst performing industry in the S&P 500 after this summer. Only technology performs even worse.
Paul Kedrosky, a venture capitalist and fellow at the MIT Institute, said investors have made a serious mistake — they were assessing old-line industrial companies as if they were semiconductor stocks. Brett Ryan, a senior U.S. economist at Deutsche Bank, stated it in another way: institutional money rushed into these stocks, and their price grew too much. Now stocks are just catching up with fears in the credit markets about the riskiness of the financing behind the boom.
However, the construction itself has not slowed down. At least for the time being. Expenditures of US on the construction of data centres (excluding IT equipment and chips) amounted to $96 billion in the 12 months through September, according to the government statistics cited in the report.
Backlog of Caterpillar is currently at the record high level of $78 billion. Sales of the company in the field of power generation increased by 75 percent year over year thanks to demand in data centres. Orders of Siemens in the field of electric equipment for data centres increased by 60 percent in 2026, reaching 7 billion euros. According to Eaton, its orders doubled over the year.
Alex Cordovil of Dell’Oro Group explained the rosy situation with revenues and profits with one thing: demand exceeds supply greatly. Richard Warzala, the head of Allient, made a similar point during the company’s Nov. 5 earnings call — the data centres that are now under construction still have to be completed.
However, Kedrosky’s caution works in another direction: backlogs are trailing indicators, and they may look better than the current state of affairs due to double or triple orders aimed at acquiring capacity. Researchers from Citi noted that tighter regulation following this month’s midterm elections may increase volatility in the sector. However, a broad ban on construction is still unlikely.