diff --git a/doc/whats-new.rst b/doc/whats-new.rst
index ca172a3a85a..2b1e1c354eb 100644
--- a/doc/whats-new.rst
+++ b/doc/whats-new.rst
@@ -116,6 +116,8 @@ Bug Fixes
 - Fix :py:meth:`Dataset.interp` silently dropping datetime64 and timedelta64
   variables, through enabling their interpolation (:issue:`10900`, :pull:`11081`).
   By `Emmanuel Ferdman <https://github.com/emmanuel-ferdman>`_.
+- :func:`combine_by_coords` no longer returns an empty dataset when a generator is passed as ``data_objects`` (:issue:`10114`, :pull:`11265`).
+  By `Amartya Anand <https://github.com/SurfyPenguin>`_.
 
 Documentation
 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~
diff --git a/xarray/structure/combine.py b/xarray/structure/combine.py
index e8e973683d0..6699b32d8fa 100644
--- a/xarray/structure/combine.py
+++ b/xarray/structure/combine.py
@@ -1074,6 +1074,8 @@ def combine_by_coords(
     Finally, if you attempt to combine a mix of unnamed DataArrays with either named
     DataArrays or Datasets, a ValueError will be raised (as this is an ambiguous operation).
     """
+    data_objects = list(data_objects)
+
     if any(isinstance(data_object, DataTree) for data_object in data_objects):
         raise NotImplementedError(
             "combine_by_coords() does not yet support DataTree objects."