Data centers are the only part of US construction still growing, and one contractor in six now has a piece of it, the highest share on record.
The other five are cutting staff, Texas has paused approvals, and half of this year's announced capacity is slipping.
None of that changes the fact that every package that goes ahead has to be priced by a desk that is losing people. This report is about that desk, and about what closes the gap.
White cards are third-party figures reported as published. The dark card is our own arithmetic from public data. Methodology and sources at the foot of the page.
Spend rose 79% in two years while the rest of construction shrank. The estimator workforce is projected to fall. When a desk cannot get through a package on the deadline, the contractor passes, the work stays with the one in six who already have it, and the boom shows up in someone else's backlog. The slowdowns of the last two months change the timing of that pressure, not its direction. ContraVault AI exists to change which side of the line a desk sits on.
The Census Bureau only started breaking data centers out as their own category in its Value of Construction Put in Place survey this year. The first clean reading came in April 2026: $50.7 billion at a seasonally adjusted annual rate (SAAR), which is a monthly figure scaled to what it would be over a full year. That passed general office construction ($43.8 billion) and the whole of public transportation construction for the first time.
April 2024 was $28.3 billion. April 2025 was $39.6 billion. April 2026 was $50.7 billion. No other private nonresidential category moved like that.
The July release, published 1 September, shows what is underneath. Total US construction spending was 3.8% below July 2025. Nonresidential spending edged up 0.1%, and ABC Chief Economist Anirban Basu said the increase was entirely due to data centers; take them out and nonresidential spending fell for a second month to its lowest level since September 2023. Data centers are not one growing category among many, they are the growing category.
Total construction spending down 3.8% year over year. Nonresidential up 0.1%, entirely on data centers. Everything else is at a three-year low.
Spend counts work already under way. The better signal for an estimating desk is what broke ground recently, because every one of those projects was priced months before the first pour, and the trade packages behind them are still being bid.
A construction starts data provider's September report puts data center starts through July at $84.1 billion across 136 projects, nearly three times the same period of 2025 and close to a quarter of all nonresidential building starts this year. July alone added $2.7 billion across 23 projects, led by a $1.5 billion CyrusOne campus in Texas.
CBRE's midyear count says the same from the other end. Capacity under construction across the eight primary North American markets hit a record 7,481 megawatts in the first half of 2026, with more than 80% already leased and vacancy at 1.4%. The work is sold before it is built.
Texas leads the country with 26 gigawatts of data center capacity under construction, per JLL data reported by the Houston Business Journal in August. Virginia, the market everyone still calls the largest, has 13. By dollar starts this year Texas ranks fifth at $9.9 billion through July, which says the Texas build is broad and already under way rather than freshly announced.
Louisiana is next door. Meta's Hyperion campus in Richland Parish has grown from a $10 billion announcement to a $27 billion program, built by Turner, DPR and Mortenson, with peak onsite employment expected above 5,000. Entergy will build ten gas-fired plants totaling 7.5 gigawatts to power it, a 30% increase to the state's grid. Every one of those plants is a piping and mechanical job.
It is landing on the corridor that already builds and maintains every refinery, LNG (liquefied natural gas) terminal and petrochemical plant on the Gulf Coast. BIC Magazine put it plainly in July: gigawatt-scale digital infrastructure is drawing from the same pool of pipefitters, electricians and welders the industrial sector has relied on for decades, and the data center industry alone is projected to need 140,000 more of them by 2030.
Two things have happened since midsummer that any honest version of this report has to carry. On 3 August, Governor Abbott froze new large-load interconnections in Texas until ERCOT (the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the state grid operator) finishes an audit of every data center in its 474 gigawatt queue, a job ERCOT hopes to finish by December. On 21 September the freeze widened to every environmental permit a data center needs from the state. BloombergNEF put roughly 20% of the national pipeline at risk of delay from the Texas pause alone, and New York halted new approvals in July for up to a year.
The wider picture was already soft. Sightline Climate's count, reported by Bloomberg, says that of the roughly 12 gigawatts due online in the US this year, only about 5 were under construction, and up to half of the year's planned capacity could be delayed or cancelled. For 2027 the gap is wider, with 21.5 gigawatts announced and 6.3 under construction. More than a quarter of the 110 projects due in 2025 missed their dates. Transformers and switchgear run long, and local opposition has stopped projects in Wisconsin, Ohio, North Carolina and Virginia.
Read the slowdown for what it is. It is happening to the announced pipeline, at the power and permit gates, before a trade package exists. The 7,481 megawatts under construction are 80% leased and keep going, and starts through July are three times last year's. An audit that clears in December does not release projects one at a time, it releases a queue. The desks that will bid that queue are the ones with hours to spare when it lands.
The projects that fall out never reached a bid table. The projects that survive the audit reach it together. A slowdown at the front of the pipeline is a bunching of packages at the back.
Here is the number that decides whether this boom reaches your desk. In July, ABC's Construction Backlog Indicator found 12% of contractors under contract on a data center, carrying 11.4 months of backlog against 7.5 for everyone else. The August reading, released 15 September, moved: roughly one in six members now has data center work, the highest share ABC has ever recorded, and the gap narrowed to 9.9 against 8.3 months. Basu's reading is that more firms are getting in, not that the work is thinning out.
The door is open, and the cost of staying outside it is visible in the same release. Firms without data center awards are cutting headcount, in the words of ABC economist Zack Fritz. The share of contractors planning to reduce staff in the next six months rose to 12.3%, the most since December. Only the largest contractors, above $100 million in revenue, saw backlog fall in August, and year-over-year gains are concentrated among firms under $30 million.
That is the opportunity in one sentence. The data center segment is admitting mid-size and smaller contractors at a record rate, and the mechanical, electrical, civil and specialty scopes that spill out of every campus are bid by the trades, one package at a time, on the same deadlines as everything else on the desk.
Both groups need more estimating hours than they have. One is pricing the biggest packages it has ever seen. The other is cutting staff and chasing more bids to hold the same revenue.
Get in while the door is openThe share of contractors with data center work went from one in eight to one in six in a month. See your own mechanical or electrical package counted and priced in hours, then check it line by line.
A data center is a power and cooling building. Turner & Townsend's cost index puts electrical at 54% of an air-cooled facility's cost and 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.
That mechanical third is chilled water, coolant distribution loops, secondary pumping, dry coolers, generator fuel and fire suppression. In estimating terms it is process piping, the scope that takes longest to count on any industrial desk. The electrical half is switchgear, busway, cable tray, conduit and the instrumentation that ties it together. Between them, roughly four fifths of a data center's construction value sits in the two scopes that carry the most line items per sheet.
The package is also getting more expensive to get wrong. JLL puts shell-and-core cost at $10.7 million per megawatt in 2025, up from $7.7 million in 2020, with a further 6% rise expected this year. AI-optimized halls run past $20 million per megawatt. Equipment lead times average 42 weeks, and 57% of 2025 projects slipped at least three months.
ContraVault AI reads the piping and instrumentation diagrams, isometrics and drawing sets in a package and returns the takeoff and the priced estimate together, every line, fitting, valve, cable run and device traced back to the sheet it came from. It covers the mechanical and piping scope and, as of this month, the electrical and instrumentation scope as well. The estimator checks a first pass instead of building one.
That is the difference between a desk that can take the data center package this month and a desk that has to pass on it.
A data center package does not hold still long enough to be priced once. Hyperscalers have compressed design-to-construction timelines so far that a scope change which used to take months to process now moves in weeks, and the change that matters most is cooling. Switching a hall from air to liquid mid-build means secondary steel for the piping loops, facility water filtration, revised electrical loads and rerouted mechanical and electrical paths, with crews already on site. One colocation developer described a customer cutting a campus from nine liquid-cooled halls to seven partway through deployment because network capacity mattered more than GPU processing.
The numbers on that volatility are blunt. Projects whose design is frozen early see change orders of roughly 3% to 5% of contract value. Guaranteed maximum price contracts signed on incomplete design run 8% to 14%. The average data center started this year costs $1.06 billion and 701,000 square feet, against $352.8 million and 454,400 square feet in 2025, and cost per square foot has climbed 57% in a year to $818, with individual projects anywhere from under $300 to over $2,200. Average hyperscale build time has stretched from about 12 months to 18 to 24. A delay on a 60 megawatt facility costs its owner around $14 million a month, which is why liquidated damages now flow straight to the contractor.
The competitive side is just as unforgiving. Hyperscalers lock design-build contracts as much as 24 months before groundbreaking with a handful of tier-one builders, one of which carries a record $44 billion backlog with roughly 40% of it data centers. Bonds run to 100% of contract value. Owners have told the trade press they do not want a low first number with change orders dragging behind it; they want an estimate that reads as a technical document. And the same reporting notes that the largest firms are passing on work in other sectors that still needs bidders, which is where the door for mid-size contractors opens.
For a desk, this means the package will be priced more than once, and the second and third passes come with less time than the first. A team that needs a working week to count a mechanical or electrical scope cannot re-price it when the cooling spec moves. A team that can rerun the takeoff and the estimate from the revised set, and see exactly what changed, can.
The average is up 57% on 2025. A square-foot rate from last year's colocation job underprices an AI hall by hundreds of dollars a foot before the first change order.
Price it again, not from scratchWhen the cooling spec moves, the estimate moves with it. See a package re-counted and re-priced from a revised set, with every changed quantity flagged for you to check.
Costs are moving under the estimate while it sits on the desk. AGC's August 2026 analysis of BLS producer price data shows construction input costs up 7.1% year over year while bid prices rose 3.5%. Nearly half of Turner & Townsend's respondents reported bid or tender price increases of 6% to 15% in the past year, and another 21% saw more than 15%.
AGC's outlook found 70% of contractors were affected by tariffs in 2025. Forty percent raised bid prices, a third pulled materials purchases forward, and 11% absorbed most or all of the cost themselves. A number that was right when the package arrived can be wrong by the time it is submitted.
At $10.7 million per megawatt, a contingency added to cover what a rushed team could not see is worth millions on a single hall. It is rational protection, and it is also the reason a thinner desk loses to the desk that could count everything.
Price it before the number movesA package that sits a week on a busy desk is priced against last week's costs. ContraVault AI returns the takeoff and the estimate together, so the number goes out while it is still right.
BLS counts 221,400 cost estimators in the United States as of 2024 and projects 212,100 by 2034. Over the same decade it expects 16,900 openings a year, every one of them a replacement for someone retiring or leaving the profession. Run the arithmetic and 76% of today's seats turn over by 2034.
The wider trades are in the same position. ABC's January model says construction must attract 349,000 net new workers in 2026 to keep up, rising to 456,000 in 2027. AGC's outlook found 82% of firms struggling to fill craft roles and 80% struggling to fill salaried ones, the highest share in three years, and 60% had postponed or cancelled a project in the past six months because of staffing. McKinsey estimates 20 skilled trade openings for every new entrant through 2032.
September's ABC release adds the newest turn. Construction job openings are near a two-year high, ABC's confidence reading for staffing fell even as sales and margins rose, and Basu's summary was that labor scarcity is re-emerging as a major headwind. Hiring will not close this. The desks that get into the data center work will be the ones that get more packages out of the estimators they already have.
Most coverage of the boom stops at power, permits and craft labor, and the last two months have given it plenty of both. A May 2026 piece in For Construction Pros made the point this report is built on: before any of those constraints bite, someone has to price the job accurately enough to pursue it, and the preconstruction teams doing that have not scaled with the volume.
The mechanism compounds. A contractor who cannot price a complex package on the deadline passes on it. Every firm that walks away removes price tension from the market. The bids that do go in carry wider margins to cover what the team could not see, and at data center values that padding is structural inflation. Incomplete takeoffs then generate rework, revise, clarify and rebid, before a foundation is poured.
Contractors know where the leverage is. AGC's 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, alongside preconstruction. Twenty-three percent already use it for estimating.
Software does not make the bid decision. On a data center package the estimator still owns the scope read and the risk call. What software can take is the counting and the pricing pass, with every number traceable so the estimator can check it.
Stop passing on packagesIf your desk turned down a data center or industrial package this quarter, that is the package to bring. We count and price it while you watch, then you check it.
Put the curves together. Data center construction spend rose 79% in two years while everything else in construction fell. The estimator workforce is projected to shrink 4% over the coming decade, with three quarters of the seats changing hands along the way. One contractor in six is now inside the data center work, a record, and the rest are cutting staff. The Texas queue is frozen until an audit clears, and when it clears the packages come at once, and each of them will be priced more than once before it is awarded.
The gap will not close by hiring, because there is nobody to hire. The only variable a contractor controls this year is how many hours a package takes to count and price, and on a data center package that is mostly pipe and cable.
That is exactly the variable ContraVault AI moves. The takeoff and the estimate come back together, every quantity traced to its sheet, the estimator checks it rather than building it, and the same desk gets through more packages in the same week. More packages priced is more data center work bid, and more work bid is the only way onto the right side of the line.
The next data center or industrial package that reaches your desk, log two numbers: the estimator-hours the mechanical, piping and electrical takeoff took, and whether the desk could take the same package again next month without dropping something else.
Two packages in, you have the number this report cannot give you, in the unit you control. Then bring one of them to a walkthrough and see the same package come back counted and priced.
| Measure | Where it stands | Direction |
|---|---|---|
| Data center construction spend | $50.7B SAAR, +79% in two years | Rising, while total construction is down 3.8% |
| Data center starts, year to date | $84.1B through July, nearly 3x 2025 | Rising |
| Contractors under contract on a data center | About 1 in 6, up from 1 in 8 in July | Widening, a record |
| Texas interconnection queue | 474 GW, frozen pending audit, target December | Paused, then released as a batch |
| Change orders on unfrozen design | 8% to 14% of contract value | Rising with liquid cooling |
| Mechanical share of a liquid-cooled hall | 33%, up from 22% air-cooled | Rising |
| Cost estimators employed | 221,400, to 212,100 by 2034 | Falling |
| Estimator seat turnover by 2034 | 76% (calculated) | Compounding |
| Contractors planning staff cuts | 12.3%, most since December | Rising, outside the data center segment |
Every contractor we talk to on the Gulf Coast has the same two problems in the same week. A data center package they cannot staff and a refinery turnaround they cannot afford to lose. The estimator is the same person in both meetings. We built ContraVault AI so that person gets through the counting in hours and spends the week on the judgment nobody else in the building can do.
ContraVault AI reads piping and instrumentation diagrams, isometrics and drawing sets and returns the takeoff and the priced estimate together, every quantity traceable to its source sheet, across piping, mechanical, electrical and instrumentation. The estimator checks it and the package you would have passed on gets bid.
Bring that package. It is the one where the difference shows.