One number frames the whole nonresidential market right now: year-to-date data-center construction spending is running about four times 2025’s full-year record, according to ConstructConnect’s July report. Not four percent. Four times. And 2025 was itself a record.
Strip data centers out and the picture is ordinary. Private commercial starts are soft, office is still working off a glut, and public work is steady but not surging. Put them back in and the totals look healthy, which tells you how much of the current boom rests on one product type built for one customer set. The hyperscalers keep pulling planned capacity forward, racing to stand up compute for AI workloads that didn’t exist two budget cycles ago.
Power, not money, sets the pace
The constraint has shifted. Capital isn’t the problem; utilities are. Interconnection queues, substation lead times, and transformer backlogs now decide where a campus can actually break ground, which is why so many new sites cluster around cheap, available power rather than the metros they serve. Owners are signing power deals before they sign a GMP.
The concentration cuts both ways
A market carried by one sector is a strong market and a fragile one. The trades staffing up for shell-and-core and complex MEP on campuses like the Vantage Frontier data-center campus are riding real demand today. If AI capex plans get trimmed, or if the power bottleneck hardens into a wall, the same concentration that’s lifting the numbers now would pull them down fast. For the moment, the cranes keep coming.