Cummins has pushed out another love letter to itself. This time it is not about dogs, veterans or mental health miracles. It is about data centres. Or rather, about how Cummins plans to sit on the back of the internet for the next thirty years burning diesel while calling it partnership, progress and a prosperous world.
On paper it is a warm piece about long-term relationships, bespoke teams and mutual learning. In reality it is a pitch for locking the world’s largest data centre operators into an addiction to Cummins hardware, Cummins controls and Cummins fuel. Backup power as a permanent business model. Climate crisis as a service.
They call it building lasting connections. Out here we call it what it is. Hooking the cloud up to a stack of very large exhaust pipes and praying nobody looks too closely at the air outside the fence.
Partnership That Starts At The Wallet
The article opens with the usual self worship. Cummins has one hundred years of expertise. Thirty five years in data centres. Trusted partnerships with the world’s most innovative companies. All very solemn, very grown up, very steady hand on the genset.
Then we meet the star of the show. Brandon Ewing. Nineteen years in the company, a decade in data centres, now fronting the Strategic Data Center Business for North America. The piece frames him as a kind of diesel therapist for hyperscalers.
We are told the relationship with customers is ‘beyond the sale or even the design or the execution’. It is all about partnership and delivering ‘a more prosperous world’. Lovely phrase. Notice how nobody stops to ask prosperous for whom.
The real structure is simple.
- You buy a generator set.
- You buy the service contract that keeps it alive.
- You hook your uptime targets to their hardware roadmap.
- You discover that swapping away would be like trying to change the engine on a plane at thirty thousand feet.
That is the connection. Less soul mate. More financial handcuffs.
Customer Specific Teams, One Very Familiar Fuel
Ewing boasts that Cummins does not run a one size fits all model. They build customer specific teams. Technicians. Engineers. Supply chain. Sustainability folk. The whole professional climate theatre troupe.
The promise is that this lets them adapt around each operator’s needs. Educating each other. Co-creating value. All that LinkedIn broth.
What it actually means is that every big data centre name gets a slightly different bespoke umbilical cord into the same underlying thing. A field of engines waiting to start when the grid so much as sneezes.
These units are not marginal curiosities. Cummins is already boasting of tens of gigawatts of critical power installed in data centres across the world. Backup, standby, emergency. Pick your euphemism. It is still diesel in a box waiting to light up the sky when something trips.
The green gloss is about controls, analytics and prognostics. The core is still oil in, exhaust out.
Analytics As Leash, Not Liberation
The article spends a lot of time on analytics.
Cummins, we are told, is enhancing its ability to identify prognostics, enabling planned maintenance and scheduled outages instead of unexpected interruptions. The pitch is reliability. Predictability. No surprises.
In practice, analytics is also how you make sure nobody leaves.
- You integrate your monitoring stack with their generator controls.
- You become the only people who really understand what the numbers mean.
- You sell this back as insight, partnership and co creation.
Take that away and you do not just need a new generator vendor. You need a new way of thinking about risk. Data centre operators are already terrified of downtime. That fear is the product here. Prognostics is the hook that keeps it humming along.
The cloud looks intangible. The business model is not. It is very physical. Very steel and concrete. And very dependent on Cummins staying in the room.
The Misnomer That Nobody Has It Figured Out
One of the most revealing lines is when Ewing tells us the misnomer in the industry is that anybody has it figured out.
This is a neat trick.
If nobody has it figured out, nobody is accountable for the mess. Not the water draw. Not the grid stress. Not the emissions. Everyone is just experimenting very hard.
Except what they have figured out, in forensic detail, is how much downtime costs. Industry estimates put data centre outages at thousands of dollars per minute. That is why they keep piling on diesel redundancy. That is why data centres end up with layers of backup on top of backup.
Independent analysis now pegs global data centre electricity use at around 200 terawatt hours a year, roughly one percent of world demand, with sector emissions heading into the billions of tonnes of CO₂ by 2030. On top of that, to guarantee so called uninterruptible service, operators rely on long rows of fossil fuelled backup plant, mostly diesel generators, and the noise, fumes and NOx that come with them.
So when Cummins says they have never met a challenge they could not solve, they are telling the truth in one narrow sense. Every puzzle is approached with the same answer. Another engine. Another container. Another stack of tanks round the back.
Stability For Whom
The article leans heavily on words like stability and trust. Data centres are called critical national infrastructure. Cummins is there to keep the lights on.
What never appears is the other side of that stability.
- The communities living beside these supposedly invisible boxes.
- The local air quality when racks of diesel generators test fire.
- The grid distortions when massive standby plant comes on and off.
- The locked in emissions from sitting on gigawatts of fossil kit for decades.
Environmental groups have already started describing the internet as the world’s largest coal powered machine, once you follow the cables back to the power plants and the backup stacks.
Cummins is not in the business of challenging that model. It is in the business of lubricating it.
Future Technology, Present Tense Exhaust
There is dutiful talk of future technologies in the piece. Analytics. New controls. Better ways of predicting faults.
What you do not get is any straight admission of where the real money sits. The article never once says diesel. It says power. Equipment. Solutions. The language floats carefully above the actual fuels involved, like a cloud that does not want to admit it is made of smoke.
Yet every operator reading it knows the score.
- Grid drops, diesel starts.
- Storm hits, diesel starts.
- Somebody trips a breaker, diesel starts.
The engines do not care whether the electrons are feeding AI training or cat videos. They burn the same way.
If Cummins was serious about its own Destination Zero slogans, this piece would be about how to shut those engines down for good. About how to design data centres that do not need racks of fossil insurance to survive. About how to phase out the very business model it is trying to celebrate.
Instead it is a brochure for staying exactly where we are.
Education, Or Grooming
Ewing says that with the largest companies in the world, Cummins wants to operate in a way where they educate each other. That they are willing to educate customers and be educated in return.
Look at what actually gets taught.
Customers get taught that risk is best handled by layers of redundancy built by Cummins. That true partnership looks like flying Cummins engineers round the world to bolt more steel to more slabs of concrete. That stability means never having to bet against the generator stack.
Cummins gets educated in customer build plans, load patterns, growth curves, and political sensitivities. Enough to pitch the next round of plant as essential infrastructure. Enough to talk about being aligned with customer priorities while quietly making sure one of those priorities is lifetime engine spend.
Call it what you like. It is not a seminar. It is grooming.
The Prosperous World That Ends At The Fence
The most offensive bit, tucked in there like a mission statement, is the line about delivering a more prosperous world.
Outside the marketing copy, the actual world looks like this.
- Towns dealing with the water draw, noise and waste heat from data centre clusters.
- A grid straining under the combined demand of AI build outs and old fashioned electrification.
- Communities staring down yet another decade of fossil dependence dressed up in carbon neutral offsets and renewable contracts that do not touch the backup stacks.
Inside that fence, Cummins is doing just fine. Data centre growth is a feast. Every new campus needs engines, service, parts. Once you are in, you are in. The article is not really about partnership at all. It is about reassuring customers that the vendor at the heart of their dirty secret will still be there in ten, twenty, thirty years.
That is the connection. That is the stability. That is the prosperous world. For Cummins shareholders.
For everyone else it is just more diesel, with a shiny new use case and better lighting.
Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project