Cummins has discovered a new religion and it is called AI. Like every late convert they are loud about their purity, vague about their sins, and already passing the collection plate. This newsroom piece is a hymn to “transition” written in pencil, with diesel ink waiting underneath. They want you to picture a brave, clean future of smart grids and high-voltage elegance. Then, right when the racks start screaming for power, they shove a generator the size of a shipping container behind the building and call it resilience.
It is all clean-transition PR until the latest tech buzzword needs diesel generators. Then Cummins turns up like a dealer in a hospital corridor. “You need reliability mate” and the needle is already in your arm.
AI Is The Excuse, Not The Cause
They open with hunger. “Insatiable appetite for data”. “Power crunch”. “Colossal energy demands of AI”. It is written like a weather report. The storm simply arrived, therefore Cummins must heroically respond.
But AI demand is not a natural disaster. It is a business model with a body count. Hyperscalers keep shipping new ways to burn electricity because investors reward growth, not restraint. Cummins does not question the binge. It just sets up a barbecue next to the buffet line.
They are not warning about AI’s appetite. They are selling sauces for it.
Rack Density Porn For The Panicked
They quote the Uptime Institute to sound mature, then immediately start drooling over the extremes. Average racks are 5 to 9 kW today, they say. Then they leap to 132 kW Blackwell racks, 900 kW Rubin racks, the “mythical” 1 MW barrier.
This is escalation marketing. Make the future sound grotesque and inevitable, then sell yourself as the only adult who can keep it all upright.
Nobody in Cummins’ world asks whether a megawatt per rack is sane. The question is only how to monetise the insanity before someone else does.
Big Names, Big Moves, Big Fossil Hangover
Then the celebrity parade. Blackstone and PPL building gas plants “tailored” for data centres. CoreWeave dropping billions on GPU fortresses. Google hoarding hydro. AWS flirting with nuclear adjacency. Rolls-Royce pitching submarine reactors as server-farm accessories.
This is not momentum. It is a land grab for electricity. When hyperscalers start reserving gigawatts, they are not buying power. They are buying priority. Everyone else gets what is left in the socket.
Cummins claps because every time the public grid is shoved to breaking point, the private diesel kingdom looks more “necessary”.
High Voltage Halo, Same Old Smoke
Mid-article we get the engineer lullaby. HVDC, MV distribution, fewer conversions, better PUE, less copper, smaller footprints. It is tidy, technical, and completely beside the point.
Shaving losses off conversion while demand triples is like bragging about a better umbrella while you are wiring a tsunami generator. Efficiency is nice. But it becomes an alibi when growth is feral.
Cummins loves the volts talk because volts keep the conversation polite. Volts do not mention who lives next to the backup yard.
Cummins Powers Forward Means Cummins Sells Everything
Now the real payload. “Cummins is busy on several fronts”. Translation: the crisis has multiple revenue streams and they want all of them.
AI workload modelling for gensets. Solid-state transformers. Tier 4 diesel. Natural gas engines. Containerised BESS. Microgrids. Islanding. On-site assets when the grid is “constrained”.
This is not a strategy. It is a catalogue assortment built on grid failure. Cummins wants to be the bloke you ring no matter which way the panic breaks. Diesel, gas, batteries, control systems. They sell the lock, the key, and the alarm that goes off when you try to leave.
Batteries As Diesel’s Little Butler
Read the BESS section slowly. Batteries are not framed as replacing engines. They are framed as protecting engines. They smooth AI spikes so the gensets start less, wear less, live longer, and keep their throne room quiet enough not to frighten the neighbours.
BESS is diesel’s polite assistant, not its successor. A silk glove over a greasy fist.
It is all zero emissions talk until diesel opportunity knocks. Cummins hears knocking and kicks the door in.
Microgrids For Them, Scraps For The Rest Of Us
They pitch “disconnecting from the grid” as operational flexibility. What it really means is the richest operators building private power castles while public infrastructure is left to sweat and fail.
Hyperscalers island themselves with Cummins kit and suddenly the grid is not a shared utility, it is a nuisance they can bypass. The public gets brownouts and bills. The cloud gets a diesel-backed monarchy. Cummins is the court supplier.
Resilience for billionaires, austerity for everyone else, sold as innovation.
Future-Proofing Is Just Proof-Of-Cash
The ending is the usual soft handshake. Trusted partner. Future-proof your business. Contact your distributor.
Cummins is not trying to reduce AI power appetite. It is trying to own the feeding trough. They want to be the number you call when your campus is choking the grid and your shareholders demand uptime miracles.
AI is the new altar. Cummins is still selling the same incense. Diesel, just lit for a different god.
Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project