Road builders don’t usually chase data centers. Construction Partners just did.
The Dothan, Alabama-based civil contractor (NASDAQ: ROAD) said July 13 it closed its acquisition of Ellsworth Construction, a Tulsa asphalt manufacturer and site-work firm, pushing the company into two of the country’s busiest paving markets: Tulsa and Oklahoma City.
What Construction Partners bought
Ellsworth runs a hot-mix asphalt plant in Broken Arrow and holds a permitted plant site in greater Oklahoma City. Its crews handle paving, sitework, and utility work for public and private jobs, including several large data-center developments. The operation folds into Overland Corporation, CPI’s Oklahoma platform company, as a branded division, and Nathan Ellsworth stays on to run it. Keeping the name and the leadership is the same approach ROAD has used across its Sunbelt roll-up.
Why asphalt follows the AI buildout
A gigawatt data-center campus needs miles of access roads, laydown yards, and hardened pads before a single server rack shows up. That’s asphalt, aggregate, and grading, and it’s exactly what Ellsworth sells. Overland already runs a data-center sitework portfolio in north Texas, so bolting on an Oklahoma paver with the same customer base is a clean fit. The wave of industrial megaprojects moving across Texas and Oklahoma runs on this kind of groundwork long before anyone tours a finished building.
The vertical-integration play
Owning the asphalt plant matters as much as owning the crews. Controlling the mix insulates ROAD from the material-cost swings that have whipsawed paving margins for two years, and it locks in supply in a market where plants and quarries are running tight. That’s the quiet logic behind the deal. Where the data centers land, the site contractors get busy, and the ones that make their own asphalt get busiest. It’s a less flashy growth story than a hyperscaler’s billion-dollar announcement, but the economics rhyme, one plant at a time.