Gas Turbine Makers Are Crushing the S&P 500

GE Vernova, Caterpillar, Siemens Energy, Wärtsilä and Rolls-Royce have all beaten the S&P 500 by a mile over the past year, with GE Vernova and Caterpillar each up roughly 180%, compared to a 30% gain for the broader index. The driver: an unprecedented surge in demand for gas turbines as hyperscalers race to power their data centers.

The AI-to-gas pipeline: Artificial intelligence needs power and right now, the companies building the machines to generate that power are some of the best-performing stocks on the planet.

Data centers were responsible for about $2.4 billion in electrical equipment orders to GE Vernova in Q1 2026 alone, more than the entirety of 2025. The company's CEO repeated the figure twice on the quarter’s earnings call. GE Vernova now expects to reach at least 110 gigawatts of combined gas turbine backlog and slot reservation agreements by year-end 2026.

Hard to build: A gas turbine is not a car and not even a jet engine. Turbines that spins at thousands of RPM, withstand temperatures exceeding 1,600°C and must operate continuously for years without failure are one of the most complex manufacturing achievements in heavy industry.

The blades inside a large industrial turbine are cast from single-crystal superalloys, engineered grain-by-grain to resist heat that would melt conventional steel. The blades, vanes, combustors and nozzles all require highly specialized metallurgy, precision casting and coating processes that only a handful of facilities in the world can perform.

A rusty toolbox: While turbines can be made and delivered, actually building a gas power plant runs into a different type of shortage: skilled people.

North America went more than a decade with minimal new gas plant construction. The shale revolution of the 2010s created a brief burst of combined-cycle builds, but investment in gas power generation then stalled as renewables dominated new capacity additions and utilities froze fossil fuel development plans.

Construction employers in the transmission, distribution, and storage sector report acute hiring challenges, with 89% indicating at least some difficulty finding qualified workers.

+Bonus infographic: Where natural gas is produced in the US and Canada