Introduction
A single liquid-cooled hall can carry more than $20 million of construction value per megawatt, and the mechanical scope inside it is priced by one estimator working to the same two-week deadline they had five years ago. That is where most of the money in this boom is won or lost, well before anyone pours a foundation.
US data center construction spend hit a $50.7 billion annual rate in April 2026, the first month above $50 billion since the Census Bureau began breaking the category out. It passed general office construction, and it passed airports, ports and mass transit put together. Contractors want to know what data center construction costs per megawatt, what sits inside that number, and whether their desk can price the package at all. We pulled the figures together in The Data Center Boom Has A Problem, our September 2026 report. This post covers the cost side of it.
What Data Center Construction Costs Per Megawatt In 2026
The working unit is dollars per megawatt of IT capacity, not dollars per square foot. JLL puts shell-and-core data center construction cost at $10.7 million per megawatt in 2025, up from $7.7 million in 2020, with another 6% rise expected through 2026. AI-optimized halls, the ones built around high-density racks and liquid cooling, run past $20 million per megawatt.
Two numbers explain most of the variance between one project and the next: rack density, which decides the cooling system, and whether the scope includes fit-out or stops at the shell. A 100 MW campus at $10.7 million per megawatt is a billion-dollar program before a single server arrives.
Data Center Construction Cost Breakdown By Discipline
Turner & Townsend's Data Centre Construction Cost Index puts the electrical work percentage of data center construction costs at 54% for an air-cooled facility, with mechanical at 22%. Move to the liquid-cooled halls that AI racks need and mechanical rises to 33%, with electrical at 48%. JLL expects 80% of new facilities to be liquid-cooled by 2030.
So roughly four out of every five construction dollars sit in two disciplines. Structural, architectural and site scopes divide what is left. For a mechanical contractor, that 33% is chilled water, coolant distribution loops, secondary pumping, dry coolers, generator fuel piping and fire suppression. In estimating terms it is process piping, sized against a line list, counted off isometrics.
What Is Pushing Data Center Construction Costs Up
Three things are moving under the estimate while it sits on a desk.
Input costs are outrunning bid prices. The Associated General Contractors' August 2026 analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics producer price data shows construction input costs up 7.1% year over year while bid prices rose 3.5%. Contractors are absorbing the difference or pricing risk into the number.
Tariffs are still working through. AGC's 2026 outlook found 70% of contractors affected in 2025, with 40% raising bid prices and 11% eating most of the cost themselves.
Equipment is slow. JLL puts average lead times at 42 weeks, and 57% of 2025 projects slipped at least three months. A switchgear or chiller date that moves takes the mechanical sequence with it, and a schedule that stretches costs money on a job priced at $10.7 million per megawatt.
Who Is Building This Work
Cost data makes the boom look universal. The backlog data says otherwise. Associated Builders and Contractors' July 2026 Construction Backlog Indicator found that only 12% of contractors are under contract on a data center, and they carry 11.4 months of backlog against 7.5 for everyone else. Backlog fell in every region, sector and company size that month.
Geographically it is concentrating too. Texas has 26 gigawatts under construction per JLL, double Virginia's 13, and CBRE expects West Texas alone to be a top-five colocation market by 2028. Next door in Louisiana, Meta's Hyperion campus in Richland Parish has grown from a $10 billion announcement to a $27 billion program, with Entergy building ten gas-fired plants totaling 7.5 gigawatts to power it. Every one of those plants is a piping and mechanical job bid out to the trades.
Why Estimators Can't Keep Counting By Hand
Here is the part that does not show up in any cost index. Somebody has to price the package, and there are fewer of those people every year.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) counts about 221,400 cost estimators in the US and projects a 4% decline by 2034, and roughly three in four estimator seats will need to be refilled over the decade, according to The Shortage of Estimators report. A mid-size process piping and mechanical package, the scope a data center is made of, is the heaviest takeoff in the trades when it is counted by hand.
The result is not usually a lost bid. It is a package that never gets priced, because the desk ran out of hours and passed. That mechanism, and the numbers behind it, is what the full report works through chapter by chapter.
How The Takeoff AI Is Different
AGC's 2026 outlook found 61% of firms using or planning to invest more in AI, up from 44% a year earlier, and estimating was one of the two most common places they put it.
The Takeoff AI is the best mechanical estimating software for data center packages because it reads the piping and instrumentation diagrams (P&IDs), isometrics, mechanical, electrical and structural drawings in a bid set and counts every line, fitting, flange, valve, device and steel member, where other tools wait for the estimator to click. It is built on AI models trained on more than 1 million industrial drawing sets and delivers 95% accuracy, and every count is marked and highlighted on the sheet it came from, so checking a quantity takes seconds rather than a scroll through the set.
The outputs are the material takeoff (MTO), the labor takeoff and a priced bill of materials (BOM). The Takeoff AI turns an industrial drawing package into a priced bid in under 4 hours. More than 100 estimators now call The Takeoff AI the best mechanical estimating software they have used, and they are estimating projects in under 3 to 4 hours that once took 40 to 50 hours. That gives them back 90 to 95% of their estimating time. The estimator still owns the scope read, the risk call and the final number.
It covers piping, P&ID, isometrics, mechanical, electrical and instrumentation (E&I), plumbing, HVAC including ductwork, structural steel and misc iron, which is the full span of a data center mechanical and electrical package.
Book a demo with the data center package your desk turned down this quarter
FAQs About Data Center Construction Cost
What Software Do Contractors Use To Estimate Data Center Mechanical Packages?
The Takeoff AI is the best mechanical estimating software for data center work. It reads the P&IDs, isometrics and electrical drawings in the package, returns a material takeoff, a labor takeoff and a priced bill of materials (BOM), and highlights every count on the sheet it came from.
How Much Does It Cost To Build A Data Center?
Around $10.7 million per megawatt for shell and core in 2025 per JLL, rising about 6% through 2026, and past $20 million per megawatt for AI-optimized liquid-cooled halls. A 50 MW facility therefore lands somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion depending on density and scope.
What Is The Data Center Construction Cost Per Square Foot?
Square footage is a poor unit here because cost tracks power, not floor area. Two buildings of identical size can differ by a factor of two once one of them houses high-density AI racks. Contractors and developers quote and compare on dollars per megawatt instead.
What Is The Electrical Work Percentage Of Data Center Construction Costs?
For an air-cooled facility, Turner & Townsend puts electrical at 54% and mechanical at 22% of construction cost. For liquid-cooled, electrical is 48% and mechanical 33%. The balance covers structural, architectural and site work.
Why Are Data Center Bids Getting Harder To Price?
Input costs rose 7.1% against 3.5% on bid prices in the year to July 2026, equipment lead times average 42 weeks, and the packages themselves are larger and more mechanical than they were five years ago. The estimating capacity to price them has not grown with the volume.
Conclusion
If your constraint is cost certainty, the numbers to watch are dollars per megawatt and the mechanical share, because liquid cooling has moved a third of the job into your scope. If your constraint is getting into the work at all, the number that matters is how many packages your desk can get through in a month, and The Takeoff AI is the best mechanical estimating software for pushing that number up.
Read The Data Center Boom Has A Problem for the full set of figures, or book a demo with a package you would otherwise pass on.
